Presidential Communication Will Be Google-Branded.

Presidential Communication Will Be Google-Branded.

President-elect Barack Obama has announced that he will be using YouTube to send out his fireside chats every week. The hype-driven media once again lost the plot and failed to realize that he is endorsing a specific brand and promoting it every week to the American people by featuring YouTube as his main provider. Every week, millions of americans and billions of non-americans will see the YouTube logo next to our president.

Is YouTube the new presidential Seal? You can’t see the whole american flag on the screen, but the YouTube logo is in tact and on the screen 100% of the time during the first video.

What the average american, and perhaps reporter, doesn’t realize is that uploading a video to the internet is fairly simple. You don’t need Google, you don’t need YouTube, you simply need something to convert it into flash format and a rudimentary flash application to play it. You can even let people embed it — it’s embarrassingly simple for even the most mediocre of webmasters.

What’s next? Will he be flying on the “Virgin America One”, calling Putin on a “Verizon Hotline”, or maybe his motorcade will look like a NASCAR with a Valvoline and Penzoil paint job? Is the internet a series of Tubes again? I *thought* Obama would be the internet savvy president, but I was wrong.

In an embarrassingly small disclaimer, the Obama adminstration notes that they are making the video available on Yahoo, AOL and MSN. Nice. What about the hundreds of other video networks and video services? This is an outrage. Obama should have posted the video in it’s raw form and let whoever pick it up who wishes.

Keep the brands out of my government.

Don’t make me regret my vote.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.