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Friday Fun: Yes, You Should Embrace Video For Marketing

If you’ve ever wondered if your company was “too boring” to pull off any kind of viral video campaign, the examples below may convince you that it’s worth a try.

When we approached our client, Kaspersky Lab – a fast-growing Internet Threat Management company (anti-virus, etc.) – about sponsoring a user-generated video contest, we did so with trepidation.  

First off, “viral” is not something you can guarantee.  Campaigns become viral if they are FOUND, EMBRACED by the community, and if they are GOOD; if they are worth passing on. 

More to the point: even our shop’s most creative minds were struggling, a bit, guessing what might (or might not) happen on the video front, given that “anti-virus” is a very techie concept.

To Kaspersky’s credit, they embraced the idea.  (Just as they embraced the concept of a Social Media Newsroom!  Love these guys.) 

Here are two of the best entries so far.  And they are really, really good....

The key to getting this good content was a) leaving it to the user community to put their creative smarts to work on behalf of a brand that they were already rooting for, and, b) making it worth their while.  The prize-winning contestants will get some fabulous prizes ranging from an all-expenses-paid trip to Moscow (Kaspersky’s HQ) to a flat-panel TV, to an iPhone.

Hopefully this spurs your creative juices as we head into the weekend!  And if these vids above don’t do it for ya, check out the video below.  It was created by employees of NeatReceipts (another client) to flog the company’s scanner products.  Again: “boring” products inspired truly off-the-wall creativity.  

 

Posted by Todd Defren on September 28, 2007 08:37 AM |

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Comments

The transformers one is very timely and effective. I also like the "bling bling" over the top video for it's humor.

Posted by: Dan Schawbel | September 28, 2007 09:41 AM

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