Not a kernel of truth: YouTube popcorn videos are marketing tools

Videos that purported to show cellphones popping corn like a microwave drew 15 million hits.

Talk about pop culture.

A few weeks ago, up popped a trio of YouTube videos that caused eyes to pop all over Web-land. In each of the videos, none running much over 40 seconds, young people sit around a table. In front of them are kernels of raw popcorn carefully arranged inside a circle of cellphones. The phones are synchronized to ring in unison. When they go off, so do the kernels, popping off the tabletop as if zapped in a microwave oven. Exclamations of disbelief follow. Who knew a cellphone could double as a corn popper? You have to see it to believe it, and millions have.

The three "Cellphone Popcorn" videos, which carry a Cardo Systems Inc. production credit, gave no explanation for the Miracle of Spontaneous Popping. Yet the subtext could scarcely have been more obvious. If your cellphone is microwave-ably capable of doing this to Orville Redenbacher's finest, what do you suppose it's doing to your brain cells?

But wait, as they say. There's more.

While the videos attracted a huge viewership - 15 million hits and counting - it did not take long for savvy YouTubers to connect Cardo Systems to a line of products (e.g. Bluetooth headsets) that stood to benefit from a your-brain-on-cellphones scare campaign. A backlash quickly followed. "Hoax" and "debunked" were two words that soon attached themselves to the hundreds of response videos that have been posted over the last month or so.

Some go after the originals in a semi-serious way, for instance, by demonstrating the sheer futility of trying to replicate the corn-phone experiment. Others make extra-large sport - salt and butter added - of the implicit cellphone-danger message by doing what YouTubers do best: turning their skepticism and annoyance into video art.

In one such parody, a raw steak is cellularly transformed into a cooked steak dinner, mashed potatoes and green beans included. Another climaxes in a fiery explosion that appears to consume one of the cellphone owners. In yet another, one experimenter stares at an unpopped kernel and complains, "Nothing happens." "Why would the Internet lie?" his partner wonders incredulously. You get the picture.

And, for the record, so do the folks at Cardo Systems, who readily admit to having cooked up the viral marketing campaign earlier this year, which they outsourced to a French PR firm to produce and post.

"The whole idea was to release a series of humorous videos that built curiosity about who was behind them," says Kathryn Rhodes, Cardo's national marketing manager. "YouTube was specifically chosen because it's a global platform." Considering the project's modest budget and turn-around time, she says, "It has already succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

Why popcorn? "We thought, everyone knows how to make popcorn," Rhodes says. "At the same time, most people know it takes at least 30 seconds in a microwave set on High for popcorn to pop. In reality, you'd need at least 10 million cellphones to make this work."

In other words - and Cardo isn't saying how it did work - you'd have to be a little gullible to believe four ringing cellphones could turn seed corn into snack food. Then again, next year's iPhone is still on the drawing board.

Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.