YouTube star Jill Hanner on hawking Coors Light
Everyone from the New York Times to Silicon Alley Insider, even our older sister Gawker, were in a tizzy last week over a series of ads for Coors Light produced for the world's best platform for delivering booze advertising to minors, YouTube. The publicity even managed to get one of the paid response videos pulled from YouTube by the sponsor. But the companies that commissioned and produced the spot, TubeMogul and For Your Imagination respectively, missed at least one big clue that Jill Hanner might not be on the Coors Light bandwagon.
Her YouTube username's "x" prefix and suffix have traditionally denoted a member of or sympathizer with the "straight edge" movement, which eschews inebriants like alcohol. "I don't even drink beer," Hanner confirmed. So what were her instructions? "Do whatever you want to do with the video, have fun, you're known as being sexy," according to Hanner. Don't worry, you can still catch the sexy ode to the time-honored tradition of selling beer with cleavage on pretty much every other online video outlet because Hanner distributed the clip to a handful of sites using TubeMogul's own technology.
As for the takedown, she did set the video permissions to private, so it's still on YouTube, technically. And that was enough for the sponsor, because "Coors Light only knows about YouTube." The one bit of information I couldn't pry from her was what the going rate for a beer commercial response video is. But controversy or no controversy, it won't deter Hanner. "There's millions of people making videos, so it's great to have one recognized."