Heidi Klum Guitar Hero Ad

Supermodel Heidi Klum reprising Tom Cruise's Risky Business role, dancing in just socks and shirt with an electric guitar to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll.”

There are two versions of this ad—one where Heidi Klum keeps her shirt on and another, the director's cut, where Klum discards her shirt to cavort in nothing but black lingerie. The tame version was made for network TV while the stripped-down version became an instant hit on YouTube. Can you guess which one has received more online views?

The first rule of social-media marketing is “Know your audience/community,” and no marketer has yet failed by offering up shots of scantily clad women to a youth-oriented online audience. With the release of the director's cut on YouTube, Guitar Hero has seen an already successful TV ad become a viral Internet hit that is being spread by word-of-mouth across not just YouTube but also blogs (69,000 related posts) and social networks. 

YouTube BrandWatch is The Big Money's exploration into how the world's best-known businesses, so adept at managing their images offline, are being perceived online, where control is harder to come by. Every week, The Big Money features a corporate-themed video that's had significant viewership on YouTube: some approved, some unapproved, some mashed-up combinations of the two. And we'll ask our readers to vote on how the video affects the brands. We think the responses will surprise you, and provide a window onto what is fast becoming the most important playground for corporate games. (Note: This feature has no official relationship to YouTube or its owner, Google.)