“We put the B in blogging. It should be BGM, not PGM…BGM Bloggists!’” spoofs a hyperdriven Phil McIntyre (right) of his own company and the grassroots Internet craze in one episode of the now “ceased-and-desisted” PhilTube.com. Watch for its resurgence on Comedy Central this year.
With an industry summit approaching, Phil McIntyre ’93 was looking for a way to promote his company, PGM Artists, which pairs advertising agencies with production companies. So he plucked from his own roster Hart+Larsson and commissioned them to create something, anything, that would whip potential clients into a frenzy. The result? PhilTube.com—a YouTube doppelgänger featuring McIntyre himself in a series of tongue-in-cheek videos that call to mind the role played by fellow Denisonian Steve Carrell ’84 in “The Office.”
The site featured a page design noticeably similar to YouTube and a framework inside which McIntyre, who had never acted before, and other bit players—including PGM employees Michael Lobikis ’06 and Carol Collins ’05—could improvise. Included in the collection of videos were spoofs of YouTube’s accidental celebrities lonelygirl15 and the Star Wars kid. But the video that became the most popular and went viral—tech speak for material that becomes ubiquitous in cyber space—was “Did You Say Blogging?” Soon after PhilTube went live, the clip caught on and links began appearing on—what else?—blogs all over the web. And to “underscore the phenomenal purity of something going naked viral,” as McIntyre puts it, “during it’s run someone out there in the ether put the clip on YouTube.” (Readers playing along at home can search that site for “I’m Blogging”.)
Four weeks, tens of thousands of hits, and one cease-and-desist letter from YouTube later, PhilTube was an undeniable success. At its peak, according to alexa.com, the site was the 25,421st most popular on the web (by comparison, denison.edu is the 103,501st most popular). Beyond bloggers, the mainstream press took notice. “I declare PhilTube funnier than ‘The Office’,” said Aaron Barnhart of the Kansas City Star.
“I’m tickled the Google-YouTube merger happened in the middle of all of it,” McIntyre said. PhilTube was greenlit before the search engine giant shelled out $1.65 billion for the video site. He immediately complied with the YouTube order and pulled the plug, but its spirit lives on in the collective memory of the blogging community, as well as that one, ironic corner of YouTube. Now PhilTube is being developed in-house at Comedy Central. McIntyre said further episodes are being scripted and he expects them to debut, in one form or another, during the first quarter of 2007.
The Comedy Central version may, or may not, star McIntyre. But he’s not sweating it because he has plenty of work to do. In addition to PGM Artists, McIntyre also owns and runs The Brand Gallery, a brand strategy firm. The two companies peacefully coexist in the same New York City office space.
While PhilTube was a master stroke in self-promotional mimickery, McIntyre refuses to take full credit. Like a proud father, he seems most excited at the prospects of seeing one of his own shine. “As off-the-cuff as it looked, there was a lot of work behind it,” he said. McIntyre has confidence in his own companies as well as those he represents. So did he expect for all of this to happen? “To be honest, I’m not that surprised,” he said.