Wii Fit is the latest must have game for the Nintendo Wii. It’s a game which is not only fun, but also gets you fit at the same time. There’s also another appeal – it means you can watch your girlfriend exercising in her underwear.

Wii Fit, already massively popular in both Japan and Asia, finally came out in the US on May 19th, and sold out all of the 500,000 copies Nintendo made available to the region almost immediately. For those not in the know, the game uses the motion sensing capabilities of the Wii, along with a Balance Board peripheral to help users do a series of exercises, often disguised as mini-games, in hopes of making them fitter.

On May 25th, a guy called Giovanny Gutierrez uploaded a video to YouTube showing his girlfriend playing one of these mini-games on Wii Fit. Nothing unusual there, but the selling point was that she was only wearing her underwear, and Gutierrez was supposedly filming without her knowledge.

The video, ingeniously titled ‘Why every guy should buy their girlfriend Wii Fit’ immediately started getting hits, and before long went viral. At the time of writing, it has managed to obtain over 2 million views, all in the space of two weeks.

While there are some obvious questions surrounding the morality of filming your girlfriend half naked and putting it on YouTube without her consent, the bigger question is whether this was truly a lucky hit by a random guy, or a very clever piece of viral marketing by Nintendo.

Rumour and speculation has been the order of the day across Internet forums and blogs due to it being revealed that both Gutierrez and his girlfriend Lauren Bernat (the girl in the video with the nice bum) work in advertising. Not only that, but both of them work in the field of Internet campaigns and viral marketing.

Nintendo has been quick to refute the claims that it had anything to do with the video. According to The Telegraph, a company spokesman said:

“This has and is absolutely 100 per cent nothing to do with Nintendo. Nintendo did not create it and were not aware of it until it was brought it to our attention.”

That may well be the case, but there’s no doubting the fact that the video has helped increase knowledge of the game, and the Nintendo Wii in to the bargain. Although whether Nintendo wanted more brand awareness amongst the kinds of people who would bookmark this video is not clear.

One possible explanation is that the couple made the video in an attempt to increase their own profiles, and those of their businesses, which have surely seen a boost after the amount of coverage this viral has received.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 12:48 pm under Advertising, Internet, Opinion, YouTube.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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