Best Western has announced a new YouTube channel and a contest – the Worst Summer Job Ever:

The “Worst Summer Job Ever” contest is a unique way to grant a well-deserved vacation to young folks working in those “offbeat” summer jobs that they will laugh about later. Now through August 17, entrants—from teens to college students—are encouraged to submit short videos of their worst summer job experiences.

The grand prize winner will receive a vacation courtesy of Best Western, including roundtrip airfare for two, a $1,000 Best Western travel card for hotel accommodations and a $100 prepaid gas card.

While the contest sounds like fun, Best Western’s YouTube channel is a great example of bad corporate new media. The videos they’ve posted are uniformly terrible, like this one below:

Best Western’s New Media Epic Fail

According to Best Western, their YouTube channel is aimed at Gen-X and Gen-Y audiences, but they seem confused about what content to put on the site:

Best Western TV will also feature videos from exclusive Best Western partners including NASCAR, Harley-Davidson, the American Automobile Association (AAA) and World Vision, the global child sponsorship organization through which Best Western hotel owners and employees provide monetary donations to pay for food, healthcare and education to children in impoverished communities around the globe.

Here’s the sort of thing that Best Western wants Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers to watch on YouTube:

Yep – annoying advertising. This is exactly the sort of thing people go to YouTube to avoid.

As a result, they’ve racked up a whopping 80 views in three weeks.

If Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers wanted to watch Best Western ads, they’d be watching old movies on late-night TV, not surfing YouTube.

This isn’t a new media plan – it’s shoveling content onto YouTube and undermining your brand in the process.