TORONTO - The advertising minds behind the now infamous "bride wigout" video that's created an international sensation call it a "Net seed."
"You plant your seed on the Net, you nurture it, you watch it grow and then, hopefully, you watch it become a phenomenon that everyone's talking about, which is exactly what happened with the wigout video," producer Robbie McNamara said in an interview with The Canadian Press over the weekend.
"It's what we like to call a Net seed - it's our way of interactively advertising. It's more interesting, it's more entertaining, and it allows people out there to get involved."
McNamara and director John Griffith, who work for Burnout Productions, were hired by Toronto-based Capital C Communications to make a non-branded Internet commercial for Sunsilk hair products. Sunsilk wanted the word "wigout" to be highlighted due to an upcoming, more traditional advertising campaign in the works.
"It's a precursor to the advertising," McNamara, 31, said of the six-minute video entitled "Bride Has Massive Hair Wig Out." "They wanted to get the word 'wigout' to the masses."
To say the faux bride-to-be wigged out about her bad-hair day in the video, first posted to YouTube.com two weeks ago, is something of an understatement. The woman, played by 22-year-old Toronto university student Jodi Behan, has a full-fledged emotional meltdown, shrieking, cursing and hacking her hair off with scissors as her horrified bridesmaids try to calm her down.
Behan can act - her performance, in this modern-day age of women seemingly driven psychotic by the multi-million-dollar wedding industry, had the ring of truth to it. Griffith, 40, says he estimates the first million people who viewed the tantrum thought it was real, and the next two million watched because they believed it was fake.
"It didn't matter to us whether people believed it or didn't believe it - just as long as they were watching it, sharing it with their friends and talking about it," he said.
Griffith and McNamara sent the video - their first collaboration, and certainly not their last - to just 20 people. They say it took them a few days to come up with the idea, a couple of hours to shoot it in a Toronto hotel room, and a few minutes to upload it to YouTube.com, the popular video-sharing Website.
Within just a couple of days, due to the magic of the forward button, an estimated three million people had seen the video, were frantically debating its veracity on various blogs and websites, with some even mimicking it by uploading their own bridal "wigouts" on YouTube.
The excitement didn't die down even after the video was revealed to be a hoax, with the actresses doing the Canadian and U.S. talk-show circuits, including "The Today Show," and "Good Morning America."
Offers are starting to pour into Burnout because of the success of the video, Griffith and McNamara say. They have a warning for YouTube.com afficionados - there are more videos coming in the same vein as the "Wig Out."
"It's the future of advertising, and the future of entertainment in general, to allow the general population to be involved and to be interactive," McNamara says. "It's the power of the new-age media, where people pick and choose what they watch and what they want their friends to see."
Griffith adds with a laugh: "And obviously, it gets the job done."
