What do Ryan Seacrest, YouTube and a Shopping Spree have in common?…

The last few weeks, I’ve been producing a national television commercial for Ashlyne Huff that starts airing this week. It has an interesting strategy behind it. The artists name is Ashlyne Huff. This is her debut project. The first thing that sticks out about this project is that they’re trying to entice people away from digital downloads by offering the CD for only $6. This one item should be a whole discussion, (if not a whole series of discussions), about how the larger labels are trying to figure out how to adjust their business models to meet the appetites of the new music consumer.

The next interesting piece of the strategy was to add a $5,000 shopping spree with Ashlyne Huff. I’m not sure if this means they’re targeting teenage girls, which is my hunch, or if I just don’t tend to hang with guys who are really into shopping. The real purpose of the shopping spree, however, was to drive traffic to Ryan Seacrest’s website to watch the music video and, (if they’re smart), to capture email leads to further promote Ashlyne.

Of course, they don’t just want people to see the music video — they want people to see the music video ON Ryan Seacrest’s site with him giving his endorsement. However, even though they want people to watch the video on Ryan Seacrest’s site, we built the whole video to look like it was playing inside of YouTube.

The idea behind using the YouTube image is that this is where people are being moved to their purchasing decisions — more than the radio. I’m not sure if there are any statistics to back this up other than YouTube being the biggest entertainment enterprise going right now. But whatever the case, the feeling was strong that we should position the video to look as if it was being watched inside YouTube.

Of course, it’s against the law to just decide that you want to create an advertisement with someone elses logo. So this led to several conversations with the people at YouTube and a lot of revisions to make sure they liked the way we presented the YouTube look.

So what do Ryan Seacrest, YouTube and a Shopping Spree have in common? Ashlyne Huff.

If you want to see the video, click here.