Courtesy, Kyle at Green With a Gun, here is another sexy peak oil video, this time from KrisCan:
Maybe not as popular as Cassandra‘s, or at least not yet, but a lot better in my opinion. Kris shows us that humor and sex can go a long way towards engaging regular folks on otherwise serious issues, such as peak oil and global warming. It certainly worked with me. I watched every single one of Kris‘s videos.
In the same category of smart, sexy, playful green shorts, I need to mention Isabella‘s Green Porno series. It is no coincidence, and another validation of the power of sex to sell, that the top post on this blog is the one with ‘Green Porno‘ in its title. 10,457 views in three months, not bad.
That was fun, and I’m glad to see concerned folks speaking out using various art forms, whatever they’re wearing.
What she needs is a “350″ tattoo!
As for the other peak oil clip, that’s an amazing number of visits, Marguerite. Congrats. That said, I think 5,000 of them were me (as I was trying to carefully analyze the text and assertions regarding peak oil, and that takes careful listening of course).
Although I’m usually always reading, I must admit that I like to hear see people talk about these issues. It’s a little more direct.
The sex part didn’t really move me.
But I certainly would love to direct a global warming video with Cassandra. I’ve got lots of ideas.
Here videos all together work well. The sexy part is like an advertisement, getting your attention. Then comes the information, and with some humour to keep you relaxed and attentive, finishing up with humour to leave happy and wanting more.
It’s notable that on The Oil Drum article where this was discussed, the editors and commenters both focused on the “sexy” aspect to the detriment of the “information” or “funny” aspect. This is because like Kunstler they are lonely and sexist.
Kyle, your last comment makes me doubt the effectiveness of such videos. People may go to them, but do they end up more informed, more convinced, or more motivated? That is the question. It is interesting to note that the most popular Peak Oil videos on YouTube are the ones with guys delivering the facts straight up.
Well, I don’t know, to be honest.
It’s worth remembering that for every 100 or so people who look at something, only one or two comment on it. I mean, my blog has something like 70 regular daily readers – but most posts get one or two comments only. So people are interested in what I’m saying but they don’t necessarily have anything they want to say back.
So when we look at the comments in response to anything, we have to remember they’re only the minority. A few lonely losers say, “nice rack!” but what do the other 100 say quietly to themselves? I don’t know.
If you look at Kris Can’s youtube page, you can see that on three of them, the preview image is sexy. Two of those have the highest view counts of her nine videos. The third was only added three days ago, so it’s too early to say. But the next highest is “the peak oil song”, suggesting people are interested not only in sex, but music and fun. And the others have decent viewcounts. A sexy preview image seems to double or triple the views. But that’s still 1,000-2,000 people viewing the non-sexy ones. Which I think is substantial. Maybe they were hoping for a boob flash in the middle, I don’t know.
So the non-sexy stuff is getting across. What effect it’s having it’s hard to tell. It depends on the audience.
TOD is as I said a bit of a sausagefest. youtube is a more mixed audience. Just look at the comments on her videos. A quick glance over tells me it’s about one-third horny losers, one-third peak oil deniers, and one-third “yes you’re right we’re doomed”. There are one or two abusive comments, “attention whore” and so on.
Possibly it’s a question of different audiences for the same information. Some people just won’t be interested in the facts being presented straight-up, they need a bit of sex, humour and music.
It’s like I was saying a while back when Marguerite was commenting on how my blog’s written: you choose a certain style depending on the audience you hope to get. TOD is aiming at a dry academic boyish audience, Marguerite at something different, and Kris Can something different again. I think there’s no one true best way to do everything. Society is diverse, so the approaches to raising awareness and encouraging change have to be diverse, too.
Oh and to demonstrate that TOD is a bit boyish, at the moment next to the article about Orlov’s recent book I see a banner advert for Russian brides… On a page reloading it disappears and is replaced with another – it’s a Google advert, their software looks at the words which appear in the webpage and tries to find an advert with the same words. Orlov’s mentioning “Russia” probably put the flag up for that advert… but still, that TOD accepts those particular advertisements at all suggests something about TOD’s readership…
A lot of people compare the kriscan show to Oily’s video.
From what I can tell Oily Casandra’s video was designed to get a lot of hits. It does not just use a sex based video hook it also uses a lot of sex based tags. Tags are supposed to describe what the video is about and determine hits from search engines – in the case of Oily the video used to have only sex tags. Now that it has become more viewed so as a result is higher on results for the views, the number of sex tags and description were changed. Very smart from a ‘get the hits’ perspective.
It is also very well produced and uses a very good looking ‘oily’ as the stripper. Everything about the design is towards hits and views. In that regard it has clearly hit its mark!
The kriscan show is a series and looks like a personality based show. It has a lot of different videos – some, like the one with the oil cans, look designed to be like Oily.
People (ok – mostly men..) seem to get so caught up in the sex part they do not seem to recognize the differences.
I am very interested by this because if all that matters is hits all anyone needs to do is take a video of a very good looking person and place any voiceover on it. I doubt it would make the impact kriscan seems to be making – but – it sure would get hits on youtube.
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HI – great blog!
That’s funny – the top post on my blog is green porno too…
I feel cheap but sex sells i guess@!
Thanks!
Elisa
Good find, I like the video, but Cassandra is smokin.
Eric
http://getroasted.wordpress.com
Interesting…Bookmarked, thanks for the nice site!
Thanks for sharing this one!