YouTube Familiar spots, a couple of celebs, and a few surprises By Tim Nudd

Getting sick of year-end lists yet? Hopefully not, because here’s another good one—the 10 most-viewed ads on YouTube in 2011(excluding music videos and trailers). It’s no surprise which spot comes in at No. 1. That would be Volkswagen’s “The Force,” by Deutsch. (As a side note, “The Force” also managed to make the list of the 10 most-viewed YouTube videos of 2011, not just ads. It snuck in at No. 9.) A few other spots on the advertising list are interesting. Hot Wheels breaks through with its giant-ramp stunt, which we covered at length throughout the year. And I guess it does pay off to have Jennifer Aniston in your commercial. Grudging respect to Smartwarter. Full list after the jump.

Brilliant Bloggers is a weekly series here at BlogWorld where we look at the best posts from around the web all surrounding a specific topic. Every week, we’ll feature three of the most brilliant bloggers out there, along with a huge list of more resources where you can learn about the topic. You can see more Brilliant Blogger posts or learn how to submit your link for an upcoming edition here.

This Week’s Topic: Working With Brands
Working with brands in an interesting way to monetize your blog. The most common approach is to simply join an affiliate program. You can also approach companies to ask for review products or negotiate other sponsorship packages, such as sidebar ads or conference attendee sponsorship. I’ve worked with tons of brands over the years, and the results have been a mixed bag. Some brands are extremely blogger friendly. Others still think that social media is a phase. In any case, I definitely recommend checking out the beyond brilliant Working with Brands post Michele McGraw wrote right here at the BlogWorld blog…and then head to the below posts for even more brilliant advice.

Advice from Brilliant Bloggers:

10 Tips for Working with Brands and PR Companies by Naomi Ellis

Before you start working with any brand, this is a post you should read. I love Naomi’s advice – her tips give you everything you need to know to get started. When I first started working with brands, these are definitely things I wish I would have known. Follow Naomi on Twitter @sevencherubs for more great advice.

Working with Brands: Reputation, Requests, & Saying No by Ashe

I love this post because it is a bit of a reality check. Working with brands can be awesome…but there is also the potential for some major suckatude. You don’t have to say yes, even if a brand approaches you. Not every brand is the right fit for you and your readers – and this post is a cautionary tale as to why that’s the case. After checking out the post, you can follow Ashe on Twitter @ashemischief.

Conference Sponsorship: What Bloggers Can Offer Brands by Leticia Barr

Conference sponsorship is an awesome beyond awesome way to work with brands as a blogger. This post by Leticia Barr gives awesome advice – especially about how to best work with brands so that the relationship is mutually beneficial without breaking conference rules. No conference, BlogWorld included, wants to kick people out so many sure you learn about their policy before working with a brand for conference sponsorship. After reading this post, check out Leticia on Twitter @techsavvymama.

BONUS: Preserving Your Integrity When Working With Brands I know this series is called “Brilliant Bloggers” but if you want to work with brands, you need to watch this video with David Segura, the CEO of Giant Media (@dseg10)

Earlier this year, David Segura walked into a popular burger joint near his office in Santa Monica, Calif. to see if he could negotiate a corporate discount for his team.

The six employees at Giant Media, Segura’s online-video startup located around the corner, were obsessed with the restaurant. Something about the beef patties topped with manchego cheese and aioli kept them ordering at least once a week. A small percentage off future orders would all but guarantee that Segura and his co-workers remained regulars, he told the manager. He even flashed his iPhone to show that he was the restaurant’s “Mayor” on Foursquare, the ultimate sign of customer loyalty. But the burger joint wouldn’t budge.

Giant Media’s team simply wasn’t large enough to snag a corporate discount. Such deals are usually reserved for corporations, not startups, which typically have too few employees to make preferred pricing arrangements lucrative for vendors. What would a small business have to do, Segura thought, to get employees the same kinds of perks offered by large companies?

BetterWorks just might be the answer. The Los Angeles-based startup, which launched earlier this year, has created an online platform designed to help small companies build perks programs and nab local deals for their employees.

“Small-business owners can’t afford to bring in a six-figure consultant to build a perks program, and they don’t have the time to design one on their own,” says BetterWorks founder and CEO Paige Craig. “We’ve emphasized building a product that only takes a couple of minutes to set up, and decentralizes the use of the product to the employees themselves.”

Businesses subscribe to BetterWorks for $30 to $500 a month, depending on the firm’s size, then plug in the office’s locale and drop an allowance into accounts for each employee, who can use the allowance at participating vendors, which also offer percentage discounts. If management so chooses, that’s where the work ends. The platform aggregates participating vendors within a two-mile radius, offering everything from burgers to back massages.

“There are a lot of social buying cues that come from your business environment,” Craig says. “You find out where to get your suits dry-cleaned, where to work out, a favorite breakfast or a coffee spot.”

BetterWorks aims to centralize and streamline those purchases. Its platform handles the billing, the delivery and the haggling, with pre-negotiated discounts on its marketplace ranging from 10 to 70 percent off.

To date, around 17,000 employees from 184 companies, mostly based in Los Angeles and San Francisco, receive discounts for using the service. Vendors, which sign up for free but hand over a percentage of each transaction to BetterWorks, now total close to 2,400. BetterWorks says it’s signing up hundreds a week.

Upon first glance, some vendors may see the service as nothing more than another Groupon clone. Following the three-year old daily-deals site’s meteoric growth, Groupon spawned a wave of copycats partly because its business model is easy to replicate: Team up with vendors, publicize a discount for the vendors’ products or services and then take a chunk of the revenue that comes in.

Business owners have become increasingly wary of such partnerships, as reports surface that users of Groupon and similar services are just one-off deal seekers who don’t become repeat buyers, leaving participating vendors with minuscule margins on oversold orders and no new customers to show for it.

“I’ve heard some Groupon horror stories,” says Ed Park, the general manager of Klothes Apparel, a Los Angeles-based print screening company now in talks with BetterWorks.

But despite its similarities, Craig says he hasn’t had any trouble recruiting vendors. Park, for example, is strongly considering doling out discounts on the BetterWorks platform, encouraged by the company’s policy that only users within a two-mile vicinity of participating vendors can see their deals. These are the users, Craig tells prospective vendors, who are most likely to be repeat customers.

In Santa Monica’s burgeoning community of young technology startups, which locals have begun calling “Silicon Beach,” Craig is considered a entrepreneurial heavyweight. In 2007, the 36-year old ex-Marine built a public relations firm on the front lines of Iraq that sought to improve Iraqi public opinion of the United States and the war. Since 2009, he’s invested in more than 40 startups. His two partners are also marquee players in the tech space: George Ishii was an early employee at PayPal, while Zao Yang, the creator of FarmVille, one of Zynga’s most popular games, reportedly turned down an eight-figure restricted-stock package at the social gaming behemoth to join BetterWorks.

The trio, which picked up an $8 million investment from Redpoint Ventures earlier this month to fuel a 20-city expansion, continues to roll out new features on the site. Algorithms now track purchases on the platform, which automatically recommends deals, much like Amazon suggests books. The service also sends office-wide alerts when orders are placed, allowing co-workers to tag along.

Giant Media, which started using the service several months ago, now gets 10 percent knocked off its orders from that burger joint. Along with the savings have also come changes in behavior, says Segura, who, soon after signing his employees up for BetterWorks, noticed that with the convenience at their fingertips, “lunches got shorter, folks stayed in the office and the team became more productive.” It also didn’t hurt that employees started joining the same gyms and checking out the same shops together after work.

Employee retention may be a less of an issue in some sectors, with a high U.S. unemployment rate stifling worker mobility. But startups in the tech sector are fighting hard to attract and retain tech talent amidst a hiring boom that’s creating a shortage of software developers, engineers and telecomm specialists. Born out of this very sector, BetterWorks and its platform of perks might be one tool for its peers to lure in and lock down talent.

“A big reason employees stay at companies,” Craig says, “is because they develop social connections there.”

Air New Zealand is continuing its use of celeb cameos with a new video featuring Lindsay Lohan being interviewed by Rico, the airline’s puppet mascot.

The five-minute video shows Lohan playing the straight man to Rico, a Borat-like character who hosts a talk show with a laugh track. Lohan, a fixture of gossip blogs, answers questions about Kim Kardashian, the paparazzi (or “papsmearazzi” as the malapropism-prone Rico deems it) and, oh yeah, New Zealand, before pretending to fall asleep after being hypnotized.

It’s a weird little cameo to be sure and in keeping with other recent Air New Zealand stunts, like a David Hasselhoff interview with Rico and a safety instruction video featuring Richard Simmons.

Air New Zealand, which fancies itself a “high-energy airline,” is clearly going beyond what even the boldest players in the category — like Virgin Atlantic, for instance — have already done on the marketing front.

What do you think? Is it working or does this actually make you less likely to book a flight with ANZ? Let us know in the comments.

What happens when you give a monkey a machete and post it on YouTube? Twentieth Century Fox is hoping the answer is box office success.

On August 5, Rise of the Planet of the Apes will make its theatrical debut. The sci-fi film is a reboot of the famous Planet of the Apesfranchise and the likely start of a new series. The film focuses on a scientist who tests his cure for Alzheimer’s disease on an ape but instead gives it human-level intelligence, sparking the beginning of the war between man and ape.

As part of its promotional campaign for the movie, Fox has been ramping up the movie’s social media presence. The movie has had an active presence on Facebook and Twitter, but it’s really found its stride onYouTube.

For the past few weeks, Fox has been releasing a series of short videos on its YouTube channel. They show monkeys and apes performing tasks normally associated with humans. One video shows a gorilla walking upright while another depicts a chimp beating humans in a photographic memory test. The most popular one thus far, though, is “Ape With AK-47“, a 43-second clip that has amassed 6.8 million video views as of June 13.

None of these videos mention Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The only giveaway that the videos are meant to promote a movie is the “20th Century Fox Research Library” branding on the bottom corner of the video.

This week, Fox is following up on the success of “Ape With AK-47″ with a new video that depicts chimpanzees being taught how to use machetes by African military forces. The video, provided exclusively to Mashable, claims that these chimps have taught their offspring how to wield these dangerous weapons.

The campaign is clever, and so far it has gained a decent amount of traction. Do you think the viral video campaign will translate into box office dollars?

Check out Fox’s newest viral video, as well as the other videos in the series, in the gallery below:

The world didn’t really need another homage to Apple’s famous “1984” spot. But this bit from Rent.com, created by branded content shop Conscious Minds, uses some striking imagery to push a fairly subversive message: That the American Dream, traditionally conceived as home ownership, isn’t all that great. Rent.com is disdainful enough of the idea that every good citizen should hold the deed to an abode that it’s hurling a brick at the notion. This time around, the part of Big Brother is played by American politicians. The script being read through the loudspeakers draws on excerpts of speeches delivered by U.S. presidents in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, according to the video’s creators. Given the overeager buying, selling and financing of houses that fueled the current recession, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to see a brand in the rental real estate space trying to capitalize.

I’ve never been a big fan of the company’s phones, but LG sure makes some great videos. Its latest is the Smartphone Championship Race, a stop-motion NASCAR-inspired film that pits the LG Optimus Black against the iPhone, Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Arc and Samsung’s Galaxy S. The competitors’ phones are called other names so that LG doesn’t get sued (the iPhone 4 is called “Waffle’s Ivan”).

As the phones race around the track, the competitors are eliminated one-by-one because of the phones’ flaws. One is eliminated when it crashes because it can’t clear a 9.3 mm entrance. The iPhone 4 is the last one to be eliminated; it doesn’t finish the race because its weight keeps it from making it to the other side when it jumps from a ramp. The video is pretty clever, and hey, if you can’t make the best phone in the world, at least you can make some cool stop-motion action.