YouTube Rewind 2012. The Top Watched Videos and A Mash-Up Of The Most Viewed Videos Of The Year.

This year, Korean Pop music transcended boundaries and took the world by storm. Cover songs, parodies, and "do-it-yourself" music videos from all genres entertained us in countries near and far. And you participated in conversations at a global scale, uploading videos to share ideas on everything from nonprofit campaigns, to political satire, to new and surprising voices and talents. Plus, all over the world, you tuned in for the most up-to-date news footage of presidential elections, natural disasters and more.

Rewind YouTube Style:


2012 was a big year for YouTube. You’ve been watching over 4 billion hours of video a month. Millions of creators are using YouTube channels to experiment with innovative forms of entertainment, explore their passions and interests, take creativity and pop culture to new levels. 2012’s top trending videos and top channels showcase this creative ingenuity in ways we'd never before thought possible.

Here's a "Behind The Scenes" video featuring a look at the making of the Rewind YouTube Style 2012 video:


Globally, here’s what we were all talking about in 2012:

Top Trending YouTube Videos (playlist):
• PSY - GANGNAM STYLE (강남스타일) M/V
• Somebody That I Used to Know - Walk off the Earth (Gotye - Cover)
• KONY 2012
• "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen - Feat. Justin Bieber, Selena, Ashley Tisdale, etc.
• Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney. Epic Rap Battles Of History Season 2.
• A DRAMATIC SURPRISE ON A QUIET SQUARE
• WHY YOU ASKING ALL THEM QUESTIONS? .. #FCHW
• Dubstep Violin- Lindsey Stirling- Crystallize
• Facebook Parenting: For the troubled teen.
• Felix Baumgartner's supersonic freefall from 128k' - Mission Highlights

Top YouTube Channels of 2012:
• boyceavenue
• ERB
• HolaSoyGerman
• JennaMarbles
• lindseystomp
• PrankvsPrank
• TheFineBros
• ThePianoGuys
• theslowmoguys
• Vsauce

METHODOLOGY and FAQS:
How they determined the top video list:
This year, YouTube looked not just at views, but also shares, searches, likes and responses to identify the 10 videos that everybody was talking about in 2012. On YouTube people don’t just view a popular video, they remix, share, and parody, building a fan community that extends far beyond the watch page. They took all of this into account to ensure that they truly captured the “watercooler moments” of the year.

Is "Gangnam Style" the most viewed YouTube video of all time?
Yes. Currently, "Gangnam Style" is the most viewed video on YouTube and it will likely become the first video to hit one billion views.

Where you can see the trending videos that were popular in other countries this year:
You can see the top trending video lists for each country that has a list on the 'Browse' tab of the global YouTube Rewind channel. You can also choose from this list of country channels to visit the channels in their native languages.

Why isn't a top trending video list available for every country?
YouTube tried to make top video lists for as many countries as possible based on available information. YouTube is popular globally. 70% of views come from outside of the United States, so their global list is also representative of what people all around the world were watching in 2012.

Just how much YouTube were people watching this year?
An astounding four billion hours of video every month on YouTube.

Why they decided to make "YouTube Style" and what went into the making of this video:
For the last few years YouTube has made a video to highlight the top videos of the year. This year talented YouTube creators had billions of views on their channels and they helped entertain the world all year long, so YouTube wanted to celebrate these creators and have a little fun while they were at it.

A full list (and links to their videos) of the stars who appeared in this "YouTube Style":
PSY
Walk off the Earth
AlphaCat
KassemG 
DailyGrace
MysteryGuitarMan
DaveDays
DeStorm
PyroBooby
BarelyPolitical
RealAnnoyingOrange
FreddieW
CorridorDigital
RhettAndLink
Smosh
FeliciaDay
ChesterSee
iJustine
EpicMealTime
MyHarto
JennaMarbles
ShitGirlsSay
JuicyStar07
GloZell
ClevverTV
SmoshGames
RyanHiga

all information courtesy of YouTube

A Dramatic Ad For Belgium's Launch of TNT Is The Second-Most Shared Video To Date.

To launch the high quality TV channel TNT in Belgium, TNT’s Antwerp ad agency, Duval Guillaume Modem, came up with a very dramatic idea.

Rango Designer Debuts Super Bizarre Super Doggies First Music Video With Obama.

This is so odd, I simply had to share it with my readers. Super Doggies are a musical and 3D visual project created in 2012. The project depicts a "virtual band" of cartoon characters. This band has three animated dog members: Buffy, Abby and Bo and their universe is explored through the band's website and music videos, the first of which debuted today -and includes an appearance by President Obama. Other media will follow, such as short cartoons and an upcoming ‘live’ 3D tour.



Super Doggies are pursuing the dream to perform around the world, with the involvement of local communities, focusing on children. Concerned about their future, Super Doggies has focused its attention on the global issue of youth poverty. The Super Doggies are ‘good citizens’ who want to bring attention to the issue of poverty and work with local communities to highlight their plight. Super Doggies’s citizenship principles are founded on the conviction that the arts, business and social initiatives can, together, contribute to making a better world.



The press release:
The guy behind Rango – which just won an Oscar for best animated feature film – will help introduce a new cast of animated characters with a political bent for this election season – the Super-Doggies.

The trio of singing Super-Doggies includes Barack Obama’s dog, “Bo,” Vladmir Putin’s dog, “Buffy,” and “Abby,” the dog of a South African girl, Imani, who lives in the slums of Johannesburg.

In the 3:45 music video, Imani watches from her house how both Obama and Putin care for their dogs. All Imani has is a raggedy stuffed animal. At one point she writes to both men asking them for a real pet – and in a fantastic scene that climaxes into a dance party featuring both dancing world leaders and their dogs – she gets her wish (Obama joins the action at 2:47)



The story is timely on multiple levels. Both Russia and the US have national elections coming up (March 4th for Russia and November 6th for the US). In fact, there have been several stories in Obama’s campaign promoting how well he treats Bo considering his competitor, Mitt Romney, once placed his dog in a kennel and strapped it on top of his car for a cross-country trip.

The work of Rango’s character designer, Eugeniy Yelchin is familiar to many of us. He designed Coca-Cola’s iconic polar bears, worked on the Film, “The Brothers Grimm” and also designed the opening for HBO’s “Rome.”

For this project, Yelchin teamed up with Grammy Award winning producer Neal Pogue who works with musicians like Nicky Minaj, Lil Wayne, Outkast and Pink. The effort is also getting guidance from marketing veteran Bruce Kirkland who directed The Beatles Anthology project, and has produced albums for the Beastie Boys, the Spice Girls, Radiohead, and Everclear. The overall project is the brainchild of producer Eugeniy Kuritsyn of Global Media Line, a Moscow-based creative producing house with an impressive line of talent to realize this vision. Eugeniy wanted to create a new entertainment product that would ensure collaboration between the best representatives of international entertainment industry.

Later in the year, the Super-Doggies will go on a world tour, featuring holographic dancing and singing dogs combined with the world’s best dance talent and circus performers. A portion of the proceeds will go to animal welfare organizations to encourage people to adopt dogs.

Tour dates and other information will be announced later in the year on the Super-Doggies website: http://www.super-doggies.com/ where you can sign up for the newsletter for updates.

Braille Burger Video Spreads The Message For South African Fast Food Chain Wimpy.

South African fast food chain, Wimpy, wanted to let visually impaired people know that they offered braille menus in all of their restaurants. To spread the word they built braille burgers that blind people could actually read. With the help of skilled chefs they took sesame seeds and meticulously placed them on burger buns so that the seeds formed braille.





The company’s restaurants in South Africa have used Braille, the international language of the blind, on their menus since 2002 but wanted to spread the message and “let people know that Wimpy is a place where everyone can feel at home”.



Ad agency Metropolitan Republic South Africa had the idea to create 15 individual burgers and sesame seeds were arranged by hand on each one to create a message.

The burgers were delivered to three institutions for the visually impaired in South Africa and taste tested by blind people whose reactions were then filmed. The Art Director for the advertising campaign Dale Mullany said the company were delighted by the response.

"The response we had when these people read the message was worth every moment that it took," Mr. Mullany said.

The video (of which there is also a voice over version for the visually impaired), shown below, claims that through social media and the blind community’s Braille newsletters, the message was spread to 800,000 visually impaired people.



Credits:
Director/Editor: Willian Collison
Executive Creative Director: Paul Warner
Executive Creative Director: Peter Khoury
Creative Director: Wes Phelan
Art Director: Dale Mullany
Copywriter: Keith Manning
Agency Producer: Simone Bosman
Retoucher: Darren Bell
Photographers: (Mike Lewis and Nic van Reenen)
Music: Loyiso Madinga

images courtesy of Wimpy and Metropolitan Republic
news source: African Business Review

Jen Aniston's Sex Tape For SmartWater

Mocking some of the most popular youtube videos, Jennifer Aniston, playing dumb about social media, stars in one of her own. Puppies, Dancing Babies, Double Rainbow and a kick to the crotch help create a virus- er, viral video for the bottled water owned by Glaceau.







I just wish it had ended with her riding bareback saying "I'm on a horse"

Go Granny. Cloris Leachman Takes On The Go Daddy Girls For Network Solutions.

This Super Bowl season, Network Solutions has created a purely social media campaign to go up against the big guns [e.g. Go Daddy]. They've just released a new mockumentary internet video campaign starring their very own Go Granny, played by Academy Award winner, Cloris Leachman.



Go Granny looks back on her wild past as the original “Domain Name Girl.” With the message— get serious about your small business, she's joined by the NetSol woman, BlogHer's Lisa Stone, female entrepreneur and internet superstar.



You can also check out @Go_Granny’s wild escapades on Twitter.

To join the Twitter Takeover, follow the hashtag #gogranny on:
Friday, Feb. 4 at 6 pm
Saturday, Feb. 5 at 3 pm
Sunday, Feb.6 at 3 pm

Network Solutions

Intel's CHASE Web Video Is Kicking Ass On The Viral Charts

To build excitement around the 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ i5 processor, Intel launched this action-adventure video titled "The Chase." The spot demonstrates the performance capabilities of the new processors by creating an action-movie style chase sequence that takes place through a wide variety of program windows on a computer desktop.



Ad Age reports that "With 1.8 million YouTube views and its first entry onto the chart, Intel's "Chase" mini-movie makes it to the straight to the top for a good reason -- it's a great action flick with a sexy heroine and two leather-jacket-and-gold-chains bad guys. The campaign won 1.1 million views in its first week alone."


Credits
Advertising Agency: Venables Bell & Partners, USA
Executive Creative Directors: Paul Venables, Will Mcginness
Creative Directors: Paul Foulkes, Tyler Hampton, David Kim
Copywriter: Josh Parschauer
Art Director: Beau Hanson, Dan Kenneally
Director Of Integrated Production: Craig Allen
Agency Producer: Kacey Hart
Interactive Producer: John Eagan
Interactive Design Director: Ezra Paulekas
Production Company: Nexus Productions
Director: Smith & Foulkes
Director Of Photography: Oliver Wood
Executive Producer: Tracey Cooper
Production Manager: Alistair Pratten
Editing Company: Trim
Editor: Paul Hardcastle
Sound Design: Human
Music: Human
Composers: Edmond Dunne & Gareth Williams
Music Producer: Jonathan Sanford
Mix: Play, John Bolen
Color / Flame: Time Based Arts, James Allen & Sheldon Gardner
Aired: January 2011

Smell Like A Parody. The Best Of The Old Spice Man Spoofs.

By now everyone knows that hunky Isaiah Mustafa's portrayal of the towel clad Old Spice Man has long gone viral. And, as to be expected, there are numerous spoofs and parodies of the entertaining advertisement. Here's a few of the best.

"The Woman You'd Love Your Woman To be Like"



The Sun Newspaper spoofed the ad to celebrate 40 years of page 3. The parody was accompanied by an in-paper offer of a free pack of Page 3 playing cards on Wednesday 17th of November.



Read all about this video at http://www.thesun.co.uk/page3is40 "Smell Like A Monster"




Sesame Street parodied the spot with Grover to teach us the word "On":

 

"Study Like A Scholar"

 
A fun and smart parody to encourage students to study brought to you from the Harold B. Lee Library:

 

"The Man Who Lost His Girlfriend To The Man Your Man Could Smell Like"

 
Los Angeles comedian and YouTube star Toby Turner (aka Tobuscus) plays a guy whose girlfriend has left him to take a sunset cruise of the Galapagos Islands with the real Old Spice man.

 

"The Sausage Your Sausage Could Taste Like"

 
Bizarre and phony product, Mr. Happy's Spicy Dijon, personifies a sausage as the Old Spice Man:



This animated spoof uses Mel Gibson's phone rant as a call to the Old Spice Man by Smallpoppy productions:

 
and lastly, an entertaining Old Spice Remix by youtuber Mike Relm:

Admir Jahic & Comenius Roethlisberger Immortalize YouTube Videos As Art.

In an attempt to disrupt the haphazard collection of archived videos that YouTube has become, artist duo Comenius Roethlisberger and Admir Jahic transformed the visual (and virtual) language of “broadcasting” into a physical medium by producing illustrations and recreating virtual references by allowing elemental art materials to do what they do best.

The two artists literally captured hundreds of individual frames from popular and bizarre YouTube videos and rendered them in colored pencil on handmade paper.


close-up:

More examples (cropped for better visibility):





Drawings from the project were recently on exhibit at Colette where you can still find some available for purchase:



and here's part of the installation at Miami Basel:
as well as an installation in Kuwait:


Many of the captured frames are from some of the most popular and well-known YouTube videos. Several of these have already sold. I'm sure you'll recognize a few of these. Again, the following images are cropped so you can get a better look at the drawings.














Each drawing measures 21 inches x 31 inches (56cm x 76cm) and is based on a rendered freeze-frame, complete with video title, user ratings and number of views.

Each is available for purchase. Cost is 400 euro for the unframed drawings and 500 euro for the framed drawings.

Size: 21” X 30”/ 56 CM X 76 CM)
Medium: Colored Pencils (CARAN D’ACHE / LUMINANCE) on handmade paper

If you’d like a commission of your favorite YouTube moment, please send the artists the link of the video (send it to ado@invisibleheroes.net). If they like the video, they will select a second to render and draw for you.


Part of the project, WITHOUT YOU BABY, THERE AIN’T NO US, shown below at the Scope Art Fair, Basel, featured 605 framed drawings of frames from the YouTube video "The Star Wars Kid":




A review of the project, WITHOUT YOU BABY, THERE AIN’T NO US by Harlan Levey (Modart Magazine):

When Swiss artists COMENIUS ROETHLISBERGER AND ADMIR JAHIC, showed the first selection of their time intensive project Without You Baby, There Ain’t No Us, visitors to the Scope Art Fair in Miami found the same sort of fascination browsing their unique drawings as they likely do surfing through YouTube channels.

Attracted to pieces for personal and diverse reasons, depending who you spoke with people were drawn to an image itself (the colors of the Dramatic Chipmunk come to mind), as often as they were to the amazing amount of interest in a particular video (more than 12 million viewers have checked out the ‘evolution of dance’ already), or for the sake of nostalgia (I couldn’t resist the image of Little Man vs Big Machine or the making of Thriller, both of which have become historical markers in my life).

There are a number of intriguing and relevant aspects of this project, but that is part of the fun labor of viewing in it and won’t be polluted here. Seeing the work in the context of an art fair, one nearly crass point is revealed and this is that the output of what is actually an extensive and complex research, is succinctly translated into a new medium to produce art, which is affordable, desirable and potentially relevant to us all for various personal reasons.

If there were something like a message shining through, it would not be a direct comment on the phenomenon, but rather on the artists’ view that subjective (often absurd) personal experiences provide as much food for thought as any mediated information can. It is a work that is from people, for people and accessible to all people. In a time of diverse crisis, this democratic idealism and strict work ethic is not misplaced.

The artists amongst their work at the Scope Art Fair in New York:


For more information about the project and the artists visit these sites:
Without You baby
Invisible Heroes
Comenius Roethlisberger

Check out Comenius Roethlisberger's Sweetest Invitation exhibit of famous luxury brand logos made of sugar powder and cocaine here.