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Last June I reported on how MTV hired a couple of YouTube celebrities to promote their global warming campaign. This celebrity-on-a-budget approach is slowly starting to catch on.

According to adrants.com, the Philippine Department of Tourism recently hired HappySlip, a YouTube celeb, to promote Philippine tourism to second- and third-gen Filipino-Americans.

What I love about this pairing is that it makes sense. HappySlip is a Filipino-American. As a result, her videos are sincere and touching. Here is HappySlip’s sentimental arrival video.

If your marketing budget doesn’t have room for a celebrity endorsement try recruiting a YouTube contributor with a respectable following. They’re probably cheaper than Vanilla Ice and might even have a bigger chance of bringing in thousands of eyeballs.

MTV has recently recruited a mini-celeb duo via the CakeGroup to promote their global warming campaign.

Believe it or not, some YouTube members have developed quite the following. If you visit the Channel tab, you can quickly learn which members have the largest number of subscribers. For example, “crazyutubefreak2” has over 3,000 subscribers and a 15 year old kid named Bernice has 4,568 subscriber (and growing). That’s over 4,000 people that want to be notified every time Bernice posts something new! One of his videos has been seen by over 32,000 people.

I wonder if Bernice would talk about a product in exchange for a Playstation 3?

Speaking of selling out, here is an interesting article on this issue.