Most of us shoot snapshots or videos when we travel, particularly when we visit a photogenic place like New York City’s Times Square. Many of us even like to share them with our friends or on YouTube or Flickr—some of them, like the one above from ellievanhoutte’s Flickr stream, even make it onto travel Web sites. And when we do this with our Times Square images, we are becoming something we may not have envisioned: spreaders of advertising messages. That’s right. More and more, New York City tourists are being counted on by advertisers to be their viral messengers. 

"On sites like YouTube, Flickr and MySpace, an army of tourists and residents are spreading advertisers’ messages well beyond Manhattan, using their cell phones and video cameras as they walk through the marketing crossroads of the world,” writes Louise Story in the New York Times. “Consumer brand companies are taking advantage of that by hosting elaborate events, fully aware that those events are great fodder for footage. Hosting events in Times Square, advertisers said, is like buying product placement in a TV show or a movie—except the cameras are held by consumers and the placement is on the Internet.” Just how potent can this be for advertisers? Consider this: As of this morning, 30,121 photos on Flickr are tagged Times Square, and most of them are filled with glittering advertisements.