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Top viral videos of 2010

December 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

A pub full of beer-hardened British Soccer fans singing a love song – doesn’t get any better than that!

The British online brand magazine Popsop has issued their top ten ‘contagious’ videos of the year. (You can see them all here).  A great selection because it showcases a number of videos that didn’t get a lot of media attention here in North America. Near, or at the top of every list this year is the ubiquitous Old Spice ‘Smell like a man’ series. Another great one to watch is Levis’ ‘The guy who walks across America.’ Check out the ‘making of‘ video as well – they put a lot of time and effort into this video.

But hands down my favorite is ‘The Puma Hardchorus’. I’m a sucker for singing soccer hooligans. The video is simple, the juxtaposition of these rugged soccer fans singing this delicate love song is wonderful and there’s actually a bit of harmony in that song. Nicely done Puma!

Filed Under: Viral Video, YouTube Video Tagged With:

The power of video. A story told well can reach a broad audience.

December 23, 2010 By 1 Comment

“Rosling believes that making information more accessible has the potential to change the quality of the information itself.” – Business Week Online

Doctor and health researcher Hans Rosling has spent the last few decades of his career making statistical analysis more engaging. In this recent video (an excerpt from a BBC series – The Joy of Stats) Rosling employs animation to demonstrate how the overall health and wealth of everyone on earth has advanced over the past 200 years and more importantly, how developing nations appear to be catching up to the more prosperous western nations. While I can’t comment on whether the oversimplification of such a complex issue as global health is a good or bad thing, I am impressed with the effectiveness of Rosling’s presentation. Almost any message – corporate, educational, or otherwise can benefit from a healthy dose of ‘show me don’t tell me.’ Risling employs a compelling mix of enthusiasm and animation to highlight the important points of his message. At two million YouTube views (remember this isn’t Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber), this video clearly demonstrates that a story told well can reach a broad audience.

I’d also like to believe that the story being told is both positive and hopeful.


Filed Under: General, Video and Education, Video and Government, YouTube Video Tagged With: , , ,

The implications of Yogi Bear’s shocking death

December 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

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Warner Brothers has to be impressed, very angry and a little nervous, most likely in that order.

Edmund Earle, a recent animation graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design, developed his own ‘alternate ending’ to the current Yogi Bear movie based on the ending of the movie ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.’ Earle’s video is impressive (especially considering he did it himself) and will no doubt help to launch a successful animation career.  Earle refers to the video as a parody hoping to fall into ‘fair use‘ protection and avoid litigation. YouTube, like Hollywood is rife with ‘Parody’, ‘Inspiration’ ,’Homage’ , and people otherwise copying the style, themes or ideas of others.

This issue isn’t new but because the video is so well done, I believe it could start a much larger debate over ‘fair use.’ The simple claim would be that Earle is not directly making money off of a copyrighted brand, it was intended as a ‘parody,’ so – no harm no foul. WB on the other hand could claim harm and they might have a point. This video might also generate a huge amount of buzz for a movie that is still in theaters. (Wouldn’t it be brilliant if WB was actually behind this as a publicity stunt…)

Regardless of the legal issues or what side of the ‘fair use’ argument you happen to fall on, the implications of this video are significant to your company:

1. How much control do you have over your brand?
Is it okay for anyone to do anything they want with your brand, your copyrighted material and your intellectual property as long as they call it a parody? Most industry observers concede that social media is causing companies to lose control of their brands.

2. How should you react when this happens?
The easy and correct answer is – it depends. How much harm was caused? What are the short and long term implications? Will reacting or not reacting cause greater harm in the future? What are the PR implications to how you react? Do you scream like a petulant child or do you embrace (and therefore co-opt) the transgressor?

3. How does this ‘new reality’ affect your business and your brand in the future?
I believe this is the important consideration in this matter – the question all companies should be considering right now.  A few years ago the technology didn’t exist to allow one talented individual to develop and share something like this. Today it does. All bets are off. This is going to happen again and again, in many different ways with many different consequences.  Companies may or may not be protected by the law (just ask the recording industry), so what should you do to anticipate and embrace this change? Do you build this new reality into your future brand and business planning or do you fight kicking and screaming? Should WB start hiring more lawyers or should they be encouraging animators to develop alternate endings to some of their movies – like this one, while they are still in theaters?

Should you be steadfastly protecting your brand or sharing it with the masses?

Filed Under: General, Marketing with Video, The Effect of Video on Your Brand, YouTube Video Tagged With: , ,

Bzaar Vzaar promotional video: Oliver Stone adds drama to corporate video.

November 23, 2010 By 4 Comments

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Oliver Stone invents a new video category – ‘corporate video trailer’.

Presumably sporting a Movember ‘mostache,’  Stone plays both investor and pitchman in this recent promotional video for Vzaar – the UK video hosting service that competes with Brightcove and others. It’s sort of strange.

If the video is meant to be campy/funny then I clearly missed the humour. If it’s mean to be important and dramatic then… I missed that too. I really don’t know what to make of this video. It’s well produced, features a celebrity and has a very clear marketing message that is well delivered. It’s just …sort of strange.

It could be the dramatic music, could be Stone’s delivery, it might even be the green-screen overlay of all of the videos in the background that Stone eventually emerges from half way through the video. Something about this video is unsettling and I don’t think ‘unsettling’ is a positive brand attribute, unless you are Marilyn Manson.

I suppose the video does draw attention to itself and that’s a good thing. I’m also impressed that Stone chose to invest in the company – that’s a great endorsement of their offering. I’m just not sure how this video would make me want to use their services.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , ,

Is ‘Will it Grill’ effective marketing?

November 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Will this viral video generate revenue? My guess is yes.

Borrowing heavily from the Blentec marketing playbook (see Will it Blend ), the good folks at EZ Grill developed this ‘What Grills Faster?’ viral video to promote their portable/disposable grills.  This video was developed by an agency and there was likely some type of seeding activity to support the video, so while the cost to develop the video was much higher than just the cost of the phones you have to imagine the budget was still relatively low.  At 350,000 YouTube views to date and growing, there are a lot of people out their (myself included) who are now aware of a product they had never heard of, or considered before.

There are also a number of people upset with the blatant waste associated with this promotion – you can sense the palpable anger in some of the YouTube comments.

Why I believe this viral video is noteworthy is that it accomplishes two very important things that most viral videos do not:
1. It makes you clearly aware of the specific product – EZ Grill and,
2.  It highlights one of the key benefits of that product – in this case a portable/disposable grill that obviously throws off a tremendous amount of heat.

Will this viral have the same success as Blendtech’s ‘Will it Blend’? I doubt it.

Will it cost effectively drive awareness of their product and therefore net new sales? …probably.

Have they set themselves up for a series of new virals (like Blendtec did) where they set ablaze any number of interesting items (there’s no end of stuff that people would like to see torched)? Perhaps.

Is this effective marketing? What do you think?

{Note:  EZ Grill is also encouraging customers to send in photos and videos of themselves using the EZ Grill product in exchange for free products. This more ‘tradional’ social media marketing technique is a good engagement technique to supplement the awareness being generated by this viral video}

Filed Under: Corporate Video Examples, General, Marketing with Video, Viral Video, YouTube Video Tagged With: , , ,

T-Mobile’s next installment in the “Life’s for sharing” viral video series.

October 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Back in early 2009, T-Mobile developed their hugely successful ‘T-Mobile Dance video in Liverpool station‘ (23 million views on YouTube). Then, three months later they delivered the T-Mobile Sing-a-long at Trafaulgar Square video. (4 millions views). A year and a half  later T-mobile has introduced their most recent video developed to support their ‘Life’s for Sharing’ brand message. With this new entry, T-Mobile has delivered yet another clever video featuring great music in public places that captures both inspired performances by participants as well as great reactions from onlookers.

Creating a hit viral video is like creating a hit record – it’s really tough to do. I’m not sure if T-Mobile will ever be able to repeat the magic of the original T-Mobile Dance video, but any video that captures millions of views, as this one surely will, has to be considered a success. All of these videos are uplifting, fun to watch and very well done. I can’t think of a better way to continue to support the ‘Life’s for Sharing’ brand positioning.

Filed Under: Marketing with Video, The Effect of Video on Your Brand, Video Marketing, Viral Video, YouTube Video Tagged With: ,

Highly effective event marketing on a budget

October 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Companies spend millions of dollars each year attending, taking part in, or putting on events. Unfortunately most of these same companies miss a golden opportunity to leverage the confluence of really smart people (clients, suppliers, industry experts, media, staff, etc) who attend these events, trade shows and conferences to create lasting value by capturing the knowledge (the collective IP) at these events. It’s cheap, it’s easy and very few companies do it. What should you do? Conduct video interviews.

Hire a good video production company and choose someone familiar with the industry (either an employee or a third party) to interview attendees. You’ll also need one of your event coordinators to help you juggle interview schedules. Most attendees are primed for the event and are usually in the right frame of mind to be interviewed. (Asking for an interview outside the confines of the event is usually problematic and certainly a lot more expensive.) You obviously need to prioritize what questions will be asked during the interviews and take care in keeping the interview lively and relevant but considering the benefit, it’s surprising that more companies don’t allocate a small fraction of their event budget to develop these hugely valuable assets. This video content can be used in many different ways:

1. To send out on a regular basis to attendees to remind them and inform them of who was at the event and what was said.

2. To drive ongoing traffic to your event website.

3. To inform the media and industry influencers as to what is going on in the industry and how important your event is.

4. To promote the event for next year.

5. To get other people to attend and participate in the event so they may be seen as thought leaders next year.

6. The real benefit of these interviews is that the collective intelligence and thought leadership in these videos accrues to you.

The above image is a screen capture taken from a series of 30 interviews we shot for Rebel Voice at the Mobile Innovation Week in Toronto.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: ,

The recording industy still has their head in the sand.

October 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

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Heard somewhere in a recording industry boardroom: “I’ve got it!!!! Let’s get Gilbert Gottfried to deliver a vulgar, convoluted and condescending rant to discourage piracy!” The recording industry still has their head in the sand and this video is a big ‘Kick Me’ sign that they just pinned to their own back side.

Victory Records developed this video to discourage people from illegally downloading music. Seriously. Or perhaps they figured that being offensive is a clever and effective new marketing tactic that will draw lot’s of attention to their important cause. This video fails on pretty much every level possible:

1. Having Gilbert Gottfried deliver anything more than a irritating sentence fragment is much too much.  I can’t think of a worse choice of spokeswhiner.
2. Being vulgar is really risky. Sure, Billy Connolly, George Carlin and Chris Rock elevated it to an art form but vulgar is really tough to do well.
3. This is a condescending angry rant. Q. Who is this going to appeal to? A. Absolutely no one.
4. I suppose it was intended to be funny. It’s not. Although the request at the end did make me chuckle: ‘Now pass this on to everyone you know who loves music’.  You bet.
5. The production value is… low. I guess after paying for Gottfried the next big expense was the plastic mask for the dude standing in the background.
6. The approach is really my biggest complaint. These rants don’t work. Complaining isn’t a particularly clever tactic. The recording industry (not the music industry) is dying and no amount of complaining is going to get us back to the glory days of the 60′s. Things are digital now. New reality, new problems. Figure it out. Every other business on the planet is going through the same issues to some degree – recording companies just got there ahead of everyone else. My advice: have a drink, read Chris Anderson’s book Free,  go reinvent your industry and let us know how that goes.

I wonder what the network TV guys are up to these days?

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , ,

Inspired Viral Video shows performance is still a big part of the song.

October 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment

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So what did this one cost to make?

Like any popular song, an inspired video needs a hook. In this case the ‘hook’ is the band substituting their instruments with iPhone aps to play one of their recent songs ‘spontaneously’ on a New York subway. It feels real so it probably is, and if it’s not, it probably won’t matter. Did they do it in one take? Did they overdub some music in the studio? Was any of this really spontaneous? Perception is reality.

The band Atomic Tom delivered on a very simple idea – play your song using iphone aps instead of real instruments… in a public place. The video is certainly helped by good shot planning and structure: Start slow to limit expectations and build engagment as you go; Include crowd reaction shots to build interest and show that you should take notice of what’s going on; Include close-ups of the instruments to demonstrate how impressive (or ‘improbable’ for skeptics) the feat of playing a 4 inch sheet of glass can be.  And it certainly helps that the song they are promoting is a good one.

Like the experience of  Sons of Maxwell, this video will lift the band from obscurity and guarantee them their 15 minutes. The question remains, are they now on the same viral treadmill as OK Go where their future success is tied as much to the quality of their videos as it is to their music?

It’s a great video, and will no doubt inspire a thousand different (and lesser) variations on this theme.

… and yes, Steve Jobs has to be really happy with this video.

Filed Under: General, The Effect of Video on Your Brand, Video Marketing, Video PR, Viral Video, YouTube Video Tagged With: , , ,

Idea2Delivery – A web series about starting a business

October 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment


“Show me, don’t tell me” – is the guiding philosophy that local businesswoman Wendy Mayhew from Launch it Right employed when she came up with the idea for Idea2Delivery – a web-based video series to help would-be entrepreneurs understand what is involved in starting and running a new business.

Wendy has developed a series that follows two entrepreneurs through the various stages of building a business. The development challenge for this web series is balancing the need to inform (provide useful and practical information) with the need to entertain (getting two guys to have hissy fits and melt downs every show might get tired after a while.)

This video production was shot in Ottawa. It’s been a lot of fun working with Wendy on the series. Budgets are, of course, tight but Wendy’s tenacity, determination and unique personality always seems to win the day.  If we had the funds we could probably shoot a simultaneous second series called “Can they really get away with that?” which looks at what a very small film crew tries to get away with while shooting on a tight budget.

Below are some production shots and the video for the first episode entitled ‘The Dreaded Business Plan.”

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Filed Under: General, how-to video, local videos, Video and Education, video production Tagged With: , ,
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