If you spend a lot of time cruising around the Interweb, you may have come across a site called PhilTube.com, which — apart from looking an awful lot like YouTube, to the point where the trademark lawyers are probably salivating — hosts a bunch of videos featuring a guy named (you guessed it) Phil, doing things like sitting at his desk in a non-descript office somewhere, asking people to hold his calls because he’s busy blogging, or telling his staff to film ordinary objects around the office and upload the clips to YouTube, which they do.
Kudos to the gang over at Huffington Post’s great Eat The Press site, who tracked down the back story (or meta-story) behind PhilTube. As it turns out, the site was created by Hart+Larsson, a New York ad agency that is represented by PGM Artists. And the CEO of PGM Artists just happens to be a guy named Phil McIntyre — yes, that Phil. Phil apparently asked the agency to put together a parody site with some clips for a big commercial advertising summit.
In that inside-out way that things in New York and Hollywood sometimes turn out, Eat The Press says there have already been feelers put out about getting PGM to produce content for some sort of Web TV venture. First it’s a joke, then it’s reality.
Note: Eat The Press correspondent Rachel Sklar (a Canadian) has a great feature piece on Saturday Night Live in the latest issue of Village Voice magazine.