How to advertise online without making people watch your commercials

It's all about content. Find out what people want to watch or read, give it to them, and they will come.
There are only three of them, but they are the most brilliant cartoons about living with a cat that I've seen. They've also generated millions of views on YouTube, and when they are picked up by megatraffic sites like Cute Overload, we are thrilled to find them. Simon's Cat has his own YouTube channel where you can see the other two cat cartoons. There's not much on the channel: "Official home of the 'Simon's Cat' films from Tandem director Simon Tofield." As far as I can tell, Simon's cat is a great mode of advertising for the Tandem website, although I wonder how many cat cartoon viewers actually click over on the site link in the profile to see what Tandem is all about, watch the ads they make, read about the company. Maybe industry people, who are probably the principal target market? He's left bait in the form of a fourth video just called Tandem logo. When you click on it, that is all you see: the logo.

Maybe Chris Matyszczyk, over at Pond Culture, could explain it to us; he seems to have created the blog Pond Culture as an experiment: make a blog with the plainest of templates, no archives, no links to other posts, blog about some of the most highly trafficked stories of the day and provide only wordpress tags to generate traffic. Monitor the site to see who comes there and why. If they bother to click on the profile, they can find the URL of his other website, but it is not hotlinked. So part of the experiment seems to be seeing who actually goes to the trouble to venture over to his other sites which is embedded in complete connectivity. Oh, and he writes witty and dryly entertaining posts about being a European living in the SF Bay Area and what the view is like for us pond dwellers as we look up at the antics of the mass media, the advertisers, the politicians, and the sports franchises as they market, sell, and promote. I found his site through a link on BSYTYCD, but found it funny enough to read my way back through the blog even though he provides absolutely no archive or category shortcuts (that would compromise the purity of the experiment, as would external links).

But I digress: here's the latest from my cat's alter ego on the internet, Simon's Cat 'TV Dinner'. It is not an exact reproduction of Leo's behavior: Leo's voice is much louder and more annoying; Leo claws at the bed just out of reach rather than the sofa to get me to get up to feed him; Leo jumps up on the TV tray table in order to knock my electronic devices out of reach; we don't have a remote, but I'm sure he could work it if we did. He does steal your spot as soon as you get up, get all in your face while you are using a laptop, yowl relentlessly for food (or toy activity) while you are trying to watch TV, and do that thing with his claws when he does get on my lap.