Why Every Nintendo Should Buy Their Wii Fit a Viral Marketing Video

Yesterday, a video was making the rounds called Why every guy should buy their girlfriend Wii Fit. It definitely struck a chord with me (A 27-year-old male, aka the intended audience) as it featured a girl gyrating around and bending over repeatedly in her underwear, courtesy of actually playing Nintendo’s Wii Fit. (Video is mildly NSFW.)

This viral video was uploaded to YouTube 4 days ago and now has 475,776 views. It was dugg 8000+ times on Digg. It’s got 64 up-votes and 123 comments on Reddit.

Why every guy should buy their girlfriend Wii Fit was originally submitted to YouTube by a user named tinsleyadvertising and the two people featured in the video appear to be Tinsley Full Service Advertising employees Giovanny Gutierrez, Director of Interactive Media, and Lauren Bernat, Account Executive. At least it sure looks like it, after doing a quick search for “Giovanny Guiterrez” at Flickr…

Now, one of two things is going on here:

1. Nintendo has paid Tinsley Full Service Advertising for a viral marketing campaign that was worth every penny.
2. They should have.

In 4 days this video has been viewed almost half-million times by people who use YouTube, Reddit, and/or Digg. Not necessarily all first-adopters at this point, but definitely a tech-savvy crowd. Most definitely made up of people that would buy or own a Nintendo Wii. This was a very nice piece of viral marketing.

Or so I thought until I read the YouTube comment that was submitted with the video: “This is why I love Wii Fit. ‘Nuff said. PS This is a personal video I made… I just work at Tinsley Advertising (not related to Nintendo whatsoever). However I’d love to do work for them :)” This led to an argument about Giovanny’s agenda with my co-worker, Geoff. Maybe, they weren’t paid by Nintendo, maybe they were, maybe they want to be.

Either way, they’ve surely got Nintendo’s attention now. Nice, er, move, Giovanny.

UPDATED 05/30/08: The L.A. Times picked up on the story yesterday afternoon. They contacted Giovanny, who said that it was not a paid viral and that his girlfriend…

“She was FURIOUS,” wrote Gutierrez, who said she “called me on the phone screaming her head off and then hung up on me.”

“But now [she] finds herself actually laughing about it and enjoying her 15 minutes of fame.

LA Times - Wii Fit girl was ‘FURIOUS’ at her boyfriend