Call Of Duty Long Form

We’ve been on a rant the last few years pressing clients and prospects on producing long form video. Call Of Duty has produced a really nice new 2 1/2 minute piece with actor Peter Stormare (Fargo and Seinfeld) as The Replacer.

In a nice shift in tone Call Of Duty goes with funny as opposed to hyper-violent.

Again, we just don’t know why more aren’t building long-form when they seem to work so well.

The Beauty of Barbershops

I don’t know how any marketer can see this video and not feel inspired to make something long form about the craft of their products.

Interesting how we can know more about something like Barbering or the history of Johnnie Walker than how our 20-40k cars are made when we buy them.

Shame on any auto-marketer who isn’t crafting long-form to explain how they’re doing it differently.

Gangham Style Marketing

Gangham Style has brought in over 15 million in revenue for Korean Pop Star Psy over the last three months.  This includes: music sales, ad sales, concert tickets, tv appearances and commercials.

Anyone looking to build a spike in their marketing plan would do well to follow Psy and the K-pop studios cranking out these new stars.

The brilliant use of social and a manic, but methodical, amplification of the initial social success should be inspiring.  The K-pop have done persistent well with their Korean Stars but really did it right when they hit big with Psy.  A hit followed by a military style expansion, all in a matter of weeks.

Difficult to repeat as evidenced by the fact that Psy is the first K-pop artist to break through in the states but really solid.

Transportation Reinvention by Robin Chase

Nice summary of the amazing work of Robin Chase.  

Most haven’t heard that name but many have used the services of her companies:  Buzzcar, Zipcar and GoLoco.  Three successful companies all in the transportation reinvention game.

You could do far worse than to follow her counsel on start-ups.

Facebook’s Mobile Crisis

Great piece on CNET from Molly Wood that calls attention to Facebook’s great weakness on mobile.  Interesting and growing identification of Zuckerberg and Facebook as the last of the great web/desktop plays. Very tough to transition to that next great thing.

Microsoft never got it right with Internet

Google never got it right with Social Networks  (setting aside of course the strength of YouTube)

From here on out it’s mobile or bust.

Will they get there through acquisition? If history is any indication the answer is no.  The public pressure to deliver will force the company to pay too much attention to the existing business and not develop aggressively enough against mobile.

On the other hand, they did say no to GM and all the other marketers who’ve asked them to expand what’s possible on the platform so perhaps they have a shot.  A long shot for sure but a shot nonetheless.

IUMA relaunches

The Internet Underground Music Archive was launched in 1993.  It was created to democratize the music distribution business and give thousands of unknown bands a direct path to fans.  The concepts of: social or peer to peer influence, long-tail marketing and direct to consumer distribution were all a part of the original model.

The site was salvaged by Jason Scott (textfiles.com) and he has a nice write-up about the project.
Glad to see IUMA alive and hopefully kicking.

e.d.

The Greatest Billboard Of All Time!

 

It’s difficult to describe all the ways in which this sandwich board is brilliant.  Let’s try three:

1) It’s brutally honest.  We expect marketers to mostly hide from the truth but here’s someone being quite frank.

2) It’s funny.  We like things and people that are funny.  Putting this message on the sandwich board makes us want to hang around with the people who run this shop.  Regardless of the quality of the food.

3) The guy who wrote the review must be a bit of a douche and it probably wasn’t the sandwich that drove the review.  Somehow their willingness to put this message on the board makes us think that they must actually think their food is pretty good and that actually the jag-off who wrote it just had another issue that ticked him off.  

Since these people are so funny and we’re all so clever and appreciative of their humor we’re sure we wouldn’t be like the jerk and would actually have a great time here.  Can’t imagine there are any brands out there that wouldn’t learn a lesson in customer communication from these guys.  

The Web is Dead (Zuck told me so)

Great post from Dan Lyons on The Daily Beast / Newsweek about the Facebook Instagram purchase.

In the piece Lyons makes the rather obvious point that these mobile devices are turning out to be pretty popular.  So much so that Zuckerberg realized his Desktop Internet system will die if it doesn’t get mobile tout de suite.

We may not like Facebook as a company as much anymore but  this was a smart acquisition in the Andy Grove, “Only The Paranoid Survive” kind of way.  He may turn out to be more Jobs-like than the rest of the desktop-CEOs.

John Stewart, Obama and Your Social Voice

John Stewart recently skewered the Obama team for overly friendly, overly “social-media”-voice emails.  Not only do we agree with the sentiment expressed here about these emails but want to echo that point about voice and content for all kinds of other brands in the social space.

In the first phase of social it was ok to treat all your communication with that same community-manager “up with people” voice.  Asking people their opinions on every single thing you post because you believe it will jack up the engagement numbers, or talking to communities in overly personal language and tone.  Why not.  Heck, people were downright thrilled to hear from a company so you could get away with just about anything.  But come on enough, please.

Let’s get those social voices aligned a bit more with the brand.  That community manager voice is as grating as the Obama “Hey” subject line or our personal favorite (or least favorite):  ”Let’s have dinner”

YouTube Ceiling Tile Videos Will Set You Free!

Great write-up by Baljeet Singh, the Group Product Manager at YouTube, about how people use the network.

Interesting Stat number 1: three times more people search for “How-To” videos than “Music Videos”.

Of course most people just search for the artist or song over the generic “music video” expression but the same is true for a search for what you’re trying to do over the generic expression “How-To” so the point holds.

Interesting Stat number 2: Cellume, a company that produces ceiling tile videos, has seen over a million views.  Over a million views of ceiling tile videos.

Note to client and agency looking for a viral video concept.  Are all the basic, instructional, relevant videos produced and in place on YouTube?  If they aren’t then do not bring up the V word until they are.  Now go and do likewise.