“For a simple comedy sketch, the Saturday Night Live takeoff on the new ‘black backdrop’ Apple iPhone ads carries an awful lot of corporate baggage,” Phillip Elmer-Dewitt reports for Fortune. “The bit aired Nov. 3 and the video was posted the next day on YouTube… But by Sunday afternoon, NBC Universal (GE) had scrubbed the free version off YouTube.”
MacDailyNews Note: The fake commercial focused on a husband who uses the iPhone to be unfaithful to his wife. He boasts of how the iPhone lets him zoom in and pinch the picture of the other woman’s butt, store her under another name in his address book and erase all evidence with a swipe. (Thanks to MacDailyNews “scg” for the synopsis.)
“If you want to see the SNL sketch today, you either have to go to hulu.com, NBC and News Corp.’s invitation-only (while in beta) answer to Apple’s iTunes Music Store, or visit the official SNL page on NBC’s corporate site. Either way, you must sit through a 15-second TV-style commercial before you get to the clip — a chilling vision of what the Internet would look like if it had been invented by the folks who run broadcast television,” Elmer-Dewitt reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Futilely attempting to pull it from view – yeah, that’ll help the ratings. The suits at NBC simply do not get it: show it widely, everywhere you can, you dummies. The more people who see it, the more chance you have to connect with people who actually think it’s funny and might then be more likely to tune into and even – gasp – buy your programs (via iTunes Store). (Plus, it’ll spring back up on YouTube and elsewhere within 10 seconds, anyway.)
Oh, yeah, yeah, we know, make ’em sit through ads at hulu and whatever other NBC ghetto/debacle you’ve concocted is what you think you want, but, as we’ve already explained, CEO Zucker and the rest of the NBC dinos in suits just don’t get it. They still think they need to control everything; that they need to program, and schedule, and broadcast one-way out to the masses. Those times are gone forever. Old, tired, backwards, wrongheaded, shortsighted, and just plain moronic thinking like Zucker’s will sink NBC even deeper into the muck at the bottom of the ratings barrel.
Hey, Jeff, give Anne Sweeney a call: she understands it perfectly. Maybe she could explain it to you, you big dummy.