The video blogs of rambunctious 6-year-old Fred may seem annoying, but his high-pitched schtick has garnered him more than 500,000 YouTube subscribers, more than 13 million channel views and a top slot on the video site’s coveted "Most Subscribed" list.
It has also landed him a ticket to Hollywood.
20th Century Fox is trying its hand at tapping into Fred’s massive online following to promote the upcoming apocalyptic kid’s movie, City of Ember, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Fred has been raving about the movie in recent vlog posts. In his most recent YouTube video (embedded), he "dreams" that he visits the set of Ember and meets various cast members from the movie.
Often peddling products for pay can cause a big backlash among user-generated communities, but with Fred, there’s a slight catch: The energetic kid with a dysfunctional home life is an elaborate gag.
Fred is the YouTube persona of aspiring actor Lucas Cruikshank, a 15-year-old from Nebraska who creates the fictional video blogs. Cruikshank has landed other sponsorship deals, and they haven’t seemed to dampen his fanatical following on Google’s video site.
The partnership between Cruikshank and Fox is a web-savvy strategy that we’re likely to see more often as old-media Hollywood recognizes the potential of hooking a large chunk of its target demographic on their own turf: YouTube.
[via NewTeeVee]
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