Chrysler apologized and tried to have the video pulled from YouTube – apparently without initial success (it’s now down, “due to a copyright claim by DaimlerChrysler”). And the video has spread, to the Detroit Free Press, Jalopnik, SpikedHumor.com, and probably elsewhere.

It’s hard to pull an ad these days. Anything controversial will spread. Even if your ad airs once in an obscure market, or is placed only on a few low-traffic websites, if it’s interesting then someone’s probably made a copy to put online – and they’ll be rewarded with plenty of hits for doing so. (The most prominent example of a small ad buy provoking amazingly more free media coverage is the Swift Boat ads against John Kerry in the 2004 US presidential election.)

There have been media stories about ads being squashed for a long time, but the new element is that people can read the story and see the ad for themselves. It’s not one-day news. An ad you pull can still go viral, being forwarded from one person to another and being copied to too many sites too fast to stop.

But isn’t this what the advertiser wanted in the first place? Chrysler noted in its apology that “European commercials — especially ‘viral’ ads like this one — are often edgier,” so it seems likely that BBDO Netherlands knew its market. The comments at SpikedHumor are mostly amused. The previous BBDO Detroit ad, where a car gets a jump from a Nitro and is blown into the sky, seems different in degree of attack by the Nitro rather than in kind of attitude of the car. Even if this isn’t the brand message Chrysler wants (and if it’s not, they apparently haven’t conveyed that to BBDO anytime in the last six months), hasn’t this controversy helped reach the Nitro’s target audience?

Google launched an AdSense for video pilot at the end of May. Google Video has had ads since the beginning of the year, so presumably the insertion technology is coming from that program. Their setup allows the video creator to choose when in the clip the ad runs.

But picking the timing of an interstitial ad is only one possibility for advertising in online video content. Collected from several recent articles, here are some of the options:

Pre-roll or blipverts, before a clip starts
Midroll or interstitial, sometime in the middle of the clip
Post-roll or endcap, after the end of the clip
Bug or superimposed logo, not clickable
Bug or superimposed logo, when clicked pauses video and opens link in a new window
Bug or superimposed logo, when clicked opens additional ad content within the video frame
Ticker, generally across the bottom of the screen, like cable news channels
Link from items’ images in the video content to where you can purchase them
Sponsorship information inserted into the content
Show an advertiser’s video every certain number of other videos

What options did I miss?

The articles:
Make Way for Must Stream TV, Business 2.0, 3/1/2007
Will Video Ads Evolve?, Forbes.com, 2/23/2007
Video Ads: Every Startup Has a Different Solution, TechCrunch, 7/6/2007
The Revolution of Video Advertising, Entrepreneur.com, 5/30/2007