YouTube Tuesday: Old Spice, A Car Wrapping Company in Florida, Alamo Drafthouse

1. Old Spice

Another in the brilliant line of Old Spice videos. Never forget the power of surprise. Nor the power of keeping things to 15 seconds.

Weird often does very well on the web. And there is loads of weird in this video (like this guy’s’ three arms) — and yet it hits the right marcomms notes. Chiefly it makes people like the brand. Before you say, “oh these people can do this because they’ve already had success,”  I’d say their first video in what became this incredible series was pretty risky stuff too. And it worked. So, also never forget the pppppppahpower of taking a smart risk.

2. A Car Wrapping Company in Florida

First off, the service being advertised in this video is not my thing at all (sorry.. I’m not really a car person.) And I also personally like more polish and greater production values. But this video is a decent example of a simple, creative use of web video to promote a product or service that even a small business can do. Granted, it could have been four or five times as effective if it was four or five times shorter …but still a cool idea. You can’t see it here in the embedded video, but if you watch over at YouTube itself, you will see how simply they handled the call-to-action and link back to their site in the description text below the video.  Now I’ve absolutely seen more impressive (to me) timelapse product/service videos (e.g. for Virgin Atlantic embedded below). However, if you’re into cars (and/or Batman) then this likely is going to impress you. Note: this company is a much smaller business than Virgin Atlantic and their timelapse video has 31,000 views vs. the much bigger Virgin Atlantic’s 56,000 views.

3. Alamo Drafthouse in Austin (Warning: NSFW)

Sometimes what a brand wants to (or needs to) communicate is it’s personality and attitude. This does get harder to do when businesses get very large and must appeal to a very broad cross-section of the consuming public. But if you’re not that kind of business — and you know your audience and they allow you to have fun with them — then you can do something like this.

I love the idea of turning something negative says about a brand into a positive. See what San Francisco Pizzeria Delfina does with bad Yelp reviews.

P.S. I kinda did this too. When the late-great Keith Benjamin called me an “acquired taste” on the front page of the business section in the San Francisco Chronicle, I made these shirts for he and I. I miss Keith!