Buzz Watch: Paris Hilton's New Cell Phone Video From Japan

Authored by Jay Baage on August 24, 2006 - 8:27am.

Just when you thought that you have had about enough of Paris Hilton, she gives you more. This time it is video footage from her cell phone during a PR-tour to Japan. Whatever you might think of Paris, it is actually pretty cool to see true Web 2.0 marketing in action when Warner Bros. Records teams up with ShoZu.com & YouTube to bring fans this live video footage.
For those of you who missed it, Paris Hilton’s first album “Paris” dropped yesterday (her first single "Stars Are Blind" have had over 5 million plays (!) on her MySpace site). It is a natural fit with Paris’ mainly teen audience to promote the album using their medium of choice – the cell phone. It also happens to be Paris’ own favourite means of communication. So, Paris uses her video cell phone, or in reality someone else uses her cell phone, to shoot reality TV-like clips of her on a worldwide PR tour.

In a Web 2.0 promotion campaign, Paris’ representatives have hooked her up with video community site YouTube and the mobile software company ShoZu. The latter is a site that enables users to have photos and video ‘ZuCasts’ delivered directly to handsets or to up-load camera phone images and video clips to a wide variety of photo-sharing sites and blogs with a single click, directly from their mobile phones.
In this case, Paris’ clips are uploaded on YouTube for everyone to see. But that is not all. In a first for YouTube, the site attaches the clips with its first paid video advertisements from Fox’s hit show Prison Break. Furthermore, the clips are interactive (people can vote and post comments), they have revenue potential (from ad sales) and obviously are multi platform.

Now, this isn’t all good. The first clips Paris posted are kind of boring with the star looking at puppies in a pet store and the quality is so-so. In fact, YouTubers rated Hilton's video at just two and a half stars as of early Thursday. This places Paris far behind a popular "Diet Coke Plus Mentos Human Experiment" video which earned three and a half stars and a video of someone's pet rabbits with nearly five stars.

I guess people have come to expect more from Paris' home-made videos.