Cosmo Launches YouTube Campaign

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By: Matt Clark

As reported by MediaWeek, Cosmopolitan launched StarLaunch, a partnership with YouTube, which reaches out to aspiring musicians to upload their video to YouTube to be voted on by industry vets and music fans. The program is part of Cosmo’s “fun fearless female” platform that was launched to promote women’s accomplishments. The winner will share the stage with pop singers Natasha Bedingfield and Solange Knowles at a concert in New York in December and get $10,000 cash to help jump start their music career.

The contest offers a $10,000 cash prize, a 3-track demo produced by a professional record producer, and the opportunity to perform at up to 10 Cosmopolitan-sponsored events (along with some other stuff that I don’t care about).

This is a multimillion dollar deal that includes MySpace advertising pages in Cosmo, 365 million guaranteed impressions on YouTube (they are currently at 6,439) and a presence at the December concert… so I’m not to sure many PR and marketing pros can copy what Cosmo is doing.

This project just launched on the 8^th, so there’s not much for me to review right now, but this should be fun to keep an eye on. So far the YouTube channel has 52 subscriptions, 64 friends and only 64 videos. But lets be fair, its only been a few days.

Here are some early thoughts:

• There is not enough Cosmo branding.  Perhaps they want to great a true brand experience (not just branding), in that case, well done, I think… I don’t read Cosmo so I don’t know what the brand feels like.
• This is a very expensive campaign.  Just so everyone knows, you don’t need to drop this type of money or make this type of effort to run a successful web video campaign.  Peter Shankman’s video contests got 21,000 video hits in a few days for a ridiculously cheap price (a pair of Neil Diamond tickets)
• If they are going after the music crowd, why not partner with MySpace?
• If this was this week , how are there video’s from 3 months - 3 weeks ago listed?
• I wouldn’t have Natasha Bedingfield and Solange videos up there.  The number of video views they have are scary. I know seeing that might persuade me not to participate… if I was a fun and fearless woman…

Anyway, the entries will be cut down to the top 10 on October 21. At that point people can vote at for their favorite, and the top three acts with the most votes will move on a to live battle of the bands competition at New York’s Terminal 5 on December 5. Let’s check back in October… Someone take a note for me.