I am watching CNN. In the last fifteen minutes, Nortel’s commercial, The Cisco Energy Tax, has played four times. I’ve seen the commercial before, but I didn’t really understand it so I initially zoned out. However, seeing a media flight that includes the same spot four times in fifteen minutes is somewhat unusual, so it grabbed my attention.

I did a quick Google search on ”The Cisco Energy Tax” and pulled up a Marketwire press release on the subject. The headline was somewhat scandalous and exclaimed “Cisco Energy Tax” Costs Companies an Estimated $6.1 Billion Over Five Years. I quickly scanned the release and noticed a lot of exclamation marks, as if someone was yelling to make the point. Exclamation marks are not something used in a typical press release. Most media would not take an exclamation ridden release seriously. Then I noticed there were two YouTube videos embedded in the release. While I thought this was totally cool, I couldn’t imagine that a publicly traded company like Nortel [NYSE/TSX: NT] would issue such a controversial, in-your-face (Cisco) release. I thought it must have been a joke or something. I was wrong. When I went to News section of Nortel’s website and there is was for all to see. Holy crap, Nortel actually issued this release. Wow!

Just to make sure the release screams Web 2.0′s power to the people like no other publicly traded company has screamed before, Nortel encourages people to visit the Nortel blog Buzzboard to vote for the video they like best and the winning video will be featured in an online advertisement in October. Shazaam!  A press release with two YouTube videos and a contest based on user-generated voting that’s hosted on a blog is a Web 2.0 trifecta. Yeah baby, yeah!

While Nortel wraps the premise of the release around announcing the expansion of the ad campaign, make no mistake, this is an in-your-face bitch slap on Cisco. I kinda love it.

What do you think of the release?