• by Shankar Gupta , November 4, 2005

Just weeks after Apple Computer introduced its new video iPod with a spate of commercial-less programming, marketers have already figured out how to adapt it into an ad medium. Fast food giant Burger King Thursday unveiled a plan to sponsor a series of short comedy videos designed to be downloaded for free and played on the new iPod. The deal with broadband video download site Heavy.com is Madison Avenue's highest profile foray into the new medium yet.

Last week, a group of users of print and online publishing software maker Adobe Systems' Photoshop software launched what might have been the first iPod infomercial, a half-hour guided tour of Adobe's Photoshop dubbed "Photoshop TV."

The Burger King sponsorship entails a branded page for video files specially encoded for video iPods. Some of the downloadable videos hosted on the page are user-created Halloween shorts that feature masks of infamous Burger King spokescritters: the costumed "King" that appears in current television spots, and the net-famous Subservient Chicken.

The first of the spots, which went live Thursday, features a Heavy.com user driving up to a McDonald's drive-through window dressed as the King, with a royal robe and the plastic mask, and demanding a Whopper. Other user-created spots will be hosted starting today.

To get the videos, Heavy.com sent out masks of the King and the Subservient Chicken to a group of their especially active users who submit content on a fairly regular basis. "They [Burger King] came to us and said: 'We've got these masks, can we do something with your users?'" Heavy.com co-CEO Simon Assaad said: "We just sent about 20 masks out, and people just started turning up at our front door with videos."

Assaad said that in the future, Heavy.com hopes to incorporate more user-created content into sponsorship deals. "We're thinking we're going to do it every month if we can--it was a great idea," he said. "We got a lot of really good content out of it."