Great little education piece from Facebook about their social plugins which clears up any confusion about whether your data is then shared with the websites you ‘like’ content on.
Tag: Video
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Incredible t-shirt stop-motion video
How they do this I have no idea. Amazing.
So here’s a pop up that I didn’t automatically close. Guinness just have that knack of doing stuff which catches your eye and this was no exception.
A video and a call to action. That was it. But it did the trick.
Funnily enough when I actually went to click through to see where it would take me, it went nowhere.
Well worth your time.
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Now Business Is Social
Great video.
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Conceptual Design in 2 Minutes
Have a watch of this short video, really creative, thinking out the box stuff. You’ll be amazed at what you can do with a standard book format, some insightful quotes too.
It’s for the Rethink Scholarship in Canada which is an $18,000 scholarship for aspiring art directors and designers to Langara College’s Communication and Ideation Design course.
Naturally they’ve got a super cool entry website here where they talk about how to enter and what they are looking for in an obviously stylish fashion.
Last years winner of the scholarship was Jim Balakshin who won a two-year scholarship on to the course as well as an internship with Rethink. He’s on Twitter here.
A novel approach to recruiting for entries to what is essentially a University course..
Great video and story of the making of new Google Chrome spots from BBH. Ben Malbon opens the video and you can find more on the BBH blog. (Linked above) These guys are on fire right now and deserve to be. We live in an age where it’s harder and harder for brands to tell their own stories; social media, word of mouth, consumer influence have taken over. So if you are going to create something as traditional as a TV spot, best to make it so wonderful that people not only want to hear the story, they want to know the story behind the story.
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Are you ready for the 21st Century (Video)
Evian’s Roller Babies is the runaway commercially branded hit having been watched (at latest count) over 30 million times, making it the 5th most popular YouTube video of 2009, and the most watched commercial/ad/whatever you want to call it.
I forget where it was now but one person made a comment that went something like this..
“Beyond measuring the cute factor, can the client actually measure and attribute a boost in product sales to this effort? If so, I’d love to know how they’re measuring it.”
I liked their thinking. But at the same time I think that’s discounting a lot of the great work that has evidently been put in. So let us postulate a bit more about what made it so successful after you’ve had a look at it yourself if you haven’t already.
If we were to deconstruct the commercial, why has this become the most watched branded ad of 2009 and what is it about it that could be then replicated to anywhere near similar success levels?
Well, it’s a bit of fun isn’t it. You watch it and get that cutesy, fun, smiley and warm feeling. It has a backing track that lends to the fun, remember it did pretty well for Honda aswell in the Cog. (Reacquainted myself with the ‘making of’ here.) But then, in this case, you could just as easily have the backing track with nothing compelling in the forefront so credit where credit is due. I just don’t make enough of a link to Evian from the ad. It doesn’t make me want to go out and buy water, Evian water. Much like I’m not going to go out and buy a Honda tomorrow in fact, even though the financial investment and level of decision making associated to the two are complete polar opposites thus there being more chance of me buying Evian.. (Ok, bad comparison.)
I like the ad purely on the merit of the ad, in fact, I don’t think it sells enough what it is actually linked to. But maybe that was part of the trick. Maybe that’s why it did so well. People will share it as a piece of content because it is so subtly branded more than if Evian was plugged all over the place from start to finish. It loses its value as a piece of content if overly branded.
So the question that is left hanging over my head after thinking about and writing this is should brands now be concentrating less on what they are actually trying to sell and from an online perspective at least, be creating content that is watchable, entertaining and shareable in order to sell more of X. Again I think of the Cog ad. And which brings me back to what the commenter asked at the start of this post. Did Evian sell more water? Did Honda sell more cars? Did this achieve the goals set out from the off? What were the goals? I don’t know actually. On any of the above but it’d be good to find out more though to quench my curiosity.
The online integration is however, pretty fantastic and extends the life far further, another contributing factor to its success. Evidently, this was all very cleverly planned and executed.
It isn’t simply a video that has been put up on YouTube and forgotten about. There’s tonnes of content around the video. Some really brilliant stuff like teasers, interviews, wallpapers, where to listen to and download the music and of course, the obligatory Facebook fan page. This isn’t one of those all too familiar cases when a client thinks that by doing some kind of online video to promote something that it is going to automatically go viral. Yes, the dreaded v word. A sterling effort then.
What do you *feel* when you watch the ad? A compelling urge to buy Evian? An enjoyable feeling of escapism for a few minutes? I think i’m with the latter camp. Share the love.
Feast your eyes. At least this one doesn’t have that Fatboy Slim backing track.
“You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in social media…The old media paradigm was PAY to play. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You’ve got to be willing to PLAY to play.”
– Alex Bogusky, Co-Chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky
A few key messages:
1. Over 300,000 businesses have a presence on Facebook and roughly a 1/3 of these are small businesses.
2. Gary Vaynerchuk grew his family business from $4 million to $50 million using social media.
3. Lenovo was able to achieve cost savings by a 20% reduction in call center activity as customers go to community website for answers.
4. BlendTec increased its sales 5x by running the often humorous “Will it Blend” Videos on YouTube.
5. Dell sold $3,000,000 worth of computers on Twitter
6. Obama Social Media Marketing resulted in three million online donors contributing $500 million in fundraising.
7. 71% of companies plan to increase investments in social media by an average of 40% because: a) Low Cost Marketing b) Getting Traction c) We Have To Do It
Via Socialnomics
Watch this. Amazing stuff. You’ll be fascinated by some of the facts.
Did you know?
- Of the 6.1 billion people in the world, 3.1 billion of those are in work
- 77% of the US workforce have a Facebook account and 26% speak a second langauge
- Fortune 500 companies receive about 2000 CVs a day
- In 2007, 1 out of every 3 hires was made online
- There are more Blackberries and iPhones in the world than there are people in the UK
- More than 1m people signed up to Google Latitude in the first week
- US workers collectively take 917 million sick days per year
- Employees who surf the web are said to be 9% more productive
Inspiring.
Watch this.
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Twitter Parody – Worth a watch.
Something starts to get really big when the spammers wade in and the jokers make fun. The below video is freakin’ hilarious.
So everyone’s going tweet this, tweet that, what on twearth is this all about and how are they ever going to make any twoney? Ok maybe with less of the tw’s but there you tw-go. Let’s forget about the money part for a moment, in a recent interview Biz Stone said that they are currently working on value, the more value they can provide through Twitter, the more it will be worth. I think they’ll be alright for some reason.
This has probably done the rounds already in the tech circles but it’s still pretty fantastic.