The fat kid in the yellow shirt.

I came across this fan version of a Barenaked Ladies song, Wind It Up. It’s clever, stupid, real, funny, amateur, full of energy, and still, like a car wreck, I watched. Stuff like this needs to keep being posted on Wild West TV YouTube. Why? Because advertising isn’t supposed to have rules, but it does. “Can’t say this, logo has to be this big, must not show, blah, blah.” (Extend that to the current trend of CGC like Dove or Doritos Super Bowl contest ads because they’re just as bogged down in the ad rules muck as anyone. They’re far from being true consumer anything.)

Short of showing a live execution though, people doing their own thing on YouTube aren’t limited by those rules. They use bad puns–as opposed to good ones?–cheap animation tricks, air guitar from hell, stolen or sampled copyrighted material. Some of it works, most, well, is a Geico commercial.

But it’s still necessary experimentation that’s part of the process, whatever process that is. The chance you’ll see something leading you to think about something else you hadn’t before, maybe even discover someone. Or maybe even catch a glimpse of some Jack Black ‘don’t give a fuck what I look like or who’s watching’ spirit.

Like a fat kid in a yellow shirt.

He’s important because he’s cutting lose without rules and without caring whether the client thinks he sold the message enough. And you can bet, if he had a ‘Fuck Pepsi’ t-shirt on and the video got three million views, Pepsi brand people would be scrambling to see how they could get in on a piece of that hype, PR, buzz, magic. As for the brand messages they want him to talk about, he’ll have time for that later. For now, he already did.

Just by being himself on YouTube.

Tags: Barenaked Ladies, Wind It Up