Advertising and publicity for the webseries KILLER CHIHUAHUA! on YouTube

Driving to my mom’s house this morning I saw a sign wavers who’s paid to stand there all day like a mobile billboard for the cars that zoom by: “Piano Lessons” and a phone number I didn’t take down.

And for a second I thought of making a “KILLER CHIHUAHUA!” sign in all red

like this one...

or this one...

Of course with my website not phone number...

Then I thought again...

The fact is that when Katy and I launched our web series we had no idea how to deal with marketing it – we didn’t have a clue about publicity. In fact we couldn’t even afford to hire the sign waver to stand out there all day even if we wanted to. We were on a shoe-string budget and having shot it ourselves on a crummy little dv camera there was no way I wanted to put more into publicity than I did getting it into the can.

Besides, we were doing a webseries and it made only sense to find our viewers directly from the web. The great big world wide web...

The first idea was to post everything on YouTube (and everywhere else but especially YouTube). The thought was that YouTube mattered most and that we would build up a steady following of loyal “subscribers” and then drive them to our site.

But then our first YouTube video screen cap. looked like this...

That was our screen cap which if you aren’t aware is the image that YouTube shows the world. The visual shot that people click on to view your video. YouTube lets you pick one out of three. Can you believe that this brown muddy picture of Cyndi on the muddy black couch was the best one they pre-select for you? Things were not looking good.

Then of course there’s viral videos like OK Go – “Here It Goes Again” which has drawn more than 30 million hits. Not much story. Not much depth or character development. But fun. Different. And interesting.

I even like their screencap better than ours. Damn them.

So then... That was it! We would make our own viral video! I went off in my dungeon of an editing studio to create my viral masterpiece...“Techno Chihuahua”. The plan was to attract a huge audience say 20 to 30 million views like “OK Go” and then many of them would subscribe to our channel and be loyal KILLER CHIHUAHUA! fans forever more. The idea was to grab their attention with spectacle but then keep them coming back for good content. That was the idea...

Here it is. Our concept for our viral video. Check it out: “Techno Chihuahua”

Notice the default screen cap? Maybe slightly better than our first videos but only slightly. I don’t know if it tells in one picture that pressing play unleashes Cyndi doing her business in a techno beat foot stomping way. As I edited the piece I couldn’t stop laughing. It was great! It had nasty spectacle! And music! And a beat! And, It was fun! And universal! I mean, we all do it.

And as of today, and YouTube so dispassionately reminds me it’s been a whole 2 months, it has gained 4114 views. It was like I made that red sign and stood out on the cold rainy street waving it on the way to my mom’s house.

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