Viacom Did Find One Cool Way to Leverage That Kanye West Moment

I’m posting right now from a panel at Mediapost’s OMMA Global Conference, where someone just pointed out a way that Viacom, did, in fact, leverage Kanye West’s, um, “interruption” at the MTV Video Music Awards earlier this month. Not surprisingly, it’s an old-media example, but it’ll do: MTV sister network Comedy Central ran a “South Park” episode from earlier this year which skewered Kanye West — and ran it over and over for two hours. The episode, “Fish Sticks,” contains some not-safe-for-work language (shocker!), but to briefly recap, (yes, there is actually an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to this episode), here it is:

In the episode, Jimmy writes a joke that becomes a national sensation, and Cartman tries to steal the credit. Rapper Kanye West fails to understand the joke, but cannot admit that he doesn’t get it because he believes himself to be a genius.

The thing we can’t know from only the simple fact that Comedy Central decided to air the episode repeatedly the next day is whether the network actually had any inventory to sell during this two-hour block. I’ve posted recently about how cool it would be occasionally to have some just-in-time scatter available, but as this decision was made 24 hours or less before Comedy Central actually started to air the show, this probably resulted in buzz, and nothing more. But it’s not a bad start down the path about thinking about media programming more opportunistically.

Previous coverage of leveraging Kanye West’s “interruption” at BNET Media:

• Kanye West, Jay Leno and the Scatter Market [Updated]
• Taylor Swift, Kanye West and the Primitive State of Capitalizing on Viral Video
• Another Way MTV Is Missing Out With Its Kanye West Clip