NPR's Planet Money and ProPublica have been doing amazing radio stories around the recession/financial crisis. In order to lure in an audience that might not be interested in the duffel bags (aka kids on the internet) they turned to viral video magicians The Gregory Brothers. From npr.org:

Planet Money and ProPublica also partnered on the project with the Gregory Brothers of Auto-Tune the News. For those who haven't seen any of the Gregory Brothers' other videos, they describe their work this way: 'Auto-Tune the News uses real video clips like news broadcasts, viral videos and other talking head content to create funny music videos.'

Tapping a group in different medium that already has a built in audience, that's just good advertising.

Just when you thought Chatroulette was dead, along comes The Last Excorcism to reanimate it. Add scaring the hell out of you to the list of things this platform is capable of. Then notify your next of kin.

The spectacular writing and random props might not be there, but Allyssa Milano shows that she understands social media. We told you about Old Spice's perfect media plan for their latest viral videos, which Allyssa Milano was a part of. In the final video to Alyssa, the Old Spice Guy (as he's come to be known) states that they're now in "a long-term, committed relationship" and that she should tell him what do to next.

Well, Allyssa answered the call, saying in her video, "Here is your next move, you must make a $100,000 donation to the National Wildlife Federations Gulf Oil Spill Restoration Fund. Are you strong enough?"

Your move, Old Spice Guy.

By now you've hopefully seen at least one of the 100+ Old Spice reply videos. The approach itself is genius: reply to your fans to include them in the conversation. But if we dig a little deeper it's easy to see that the strategy behind these videos is even more genius.

There are now reply videos for Kevin Rose (which showed up on Digg), Rose McGowan (which she tweeted about), Alyssa Milano (which she tweeted about), Gizmodo (which they mentioned on their site), The Huffington Post (which they wrote an article about), G4tv (which they put on their blog), popular game designer Cliff Bleszinki (which showed up on Reddit), Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (which he tweeted about), Perez Hilton (which he talked about on his site) and the Ellen Degeneres Show (which they added to their site). And in one of the most glorious meta moments ever, Isaiah Mustafa — the actor in the Old Spice commercials, who's becoming a bit of a celebrity  — makes a video for himself.

The reason you keep hearing about and seeing these videos is because the media plan behind them is working. Not only are they making individual videos for their fans in order to make them feel special — they're making videos for tastemakers in order to make them feel special, which are then being shared on a variety of media outlets. A bit of flattery never hurt an advertising campaign.

Much like Pixar movies themselves, Eric Tan's retro posters for The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Wall-E show that viral marketing efforts can be charmingly sophisticated and still be a hit with the kids. Now to promote Toy Story 3, Pixar is upping the old-school ante with a faux commercial for Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear. Don't be surprised if, after watching the 30-second spot, you find yourself feeling nostalgic about a toy that doesn't exist (yet).

Sesame Street and the Muppets are becoming masters of the viral video. It's been a two year build, and if you think it's been anything but deliberate, think again.

From Today:

It's part of a canny strategy by Disney, which bought the property from Jim Henson Productions in 2004, to introduce new audiences to the stalled brand and to remind traditional fans what they were missing.

The Muppets Bohemian Rhapsody has reached over 13 million views. And the most recent Sesame Street videos (parodies of Google's Search Stories) are rising fast.

Since the Springbox team executed this, I had to blog it! For Earth Day, Dell (we) created a Facebook app that lets you select a friend and plant a tree for them. It was fun to make and has been live for one day with 1,299 trees donated so far! Check it out.

That's right, KittehRoulette! Play with the site for about two seconds and you'll see it's absolutely nothing like Chatroulette. But who cares when you've got kittens?

How do you properly promote your (fictional) incredibly high tech company? You create a new video player, with incredibly user-friendly embed and bookmarking features that YouTube should be jealous of. Click the "Grab Stark Expo Player" button below to see what I'm talking about.

Rumor has it that the player updates itself with the latest video, which is a great touch (if it's true).

(For those of you who don't know, this is part of Paramount Pictures' viral campaign for Iron Man 2.)

At first, a hotel ballroom seemed like an odd place to be discussing the monetization of videos about teenagers McGyvering dangerous weapons for sport. And the mom sitting next to me cringed more than once as Tim Hwang (ROFLCon) and Sawyer Carter Jacobs (Underwater Peoples Records) weighed the pros and cons of such ridiculously popular microgenres as fire in the hole and ghost ride the whip.

After a while, though, certain parts of What We Learned Watching Kids with Homemade Flamethrowers began to make perfect sense* — especially to those of us who publish niche content on a daily basis. The big takeaways:

• Microgenres are popular because they're equal parts primordial soup, historical archive and social enhancer
• When it comes to monetizing microgenres, profitability and credibility don't have to be mutually exclusive
• To keep a microgenres both profitable and sustainable, build an infrastructure around them and work hard to conserve them

*Just to be clear: I'm talking about the monetizing-select-microgenres part, not the endorsing-videos-about-kids-making-homemade-flamethrowers part.