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You would think that after creating animation videos for five years our ideas would run out, but they have not. Success breeds more success, and animation video creation only breeds more video ideas. It’s racking our brains and we just have to make it stop.
You’re going to help us…lol
Over the last year we have come up with some glorious ideas that will certainly go “viral” or at least put you on the map.
For our happy customers, we are going to present you with three video styles and ideas that could change your business forever. These ideas can be adjusted, changed, or adapted to your business, so my hope is that your marketing director will take a look and maybe bring us back some more ideas.
Now, I must warn you that these ideas do not come cheap, nor are they going to be simple. It’s going to take a big budget and for this to work you are going to have to let our professional animators do what they do best:
Create amazing stuff!
I will tell you whom these video ideas are not for…
· Companies with a very tight budget. (Sorry, it’s going to take a lot of time and teamwork. This does not come cheap.)
· Companies that have a hard time pushing the envelope.
· Companies who worry about offending every Tom, Dick and Harry on the planet. These videos will be loved by most, but there will be haters. There always are.
So lets jump in.
I am going to give you examples of these ideas so that you can see what type of traction they have received in the past. Remember, the reason for sharing our ideas is to spark a few ideas of your own.
Video Campaign Number 1
“Fart On A Plane”
All of us have experienced the misery that comes with plane travel. It ranks among the worst experiences – next to death. Personally, I feel like we are being treated like a bunch of lost sheep and I am sure airline workers feel like we are a bunch of dumb lost sheep.
We want to create a series of funny videos. (Five of them to be exact.) These videos are going to show the different scenarios that happen on a plane. It’s something we all relate to and it will bring a smile to the face of the audience.
The kicker is, after each video we will have branding and a message that applies to your company. It’s marketing without the audience knowing.
Here are some great examples:
Have you ever heard of “Dumb Ways To Die?”
It was a video created by Metro Train Station that has over 100 million views, but it doesn’t stop there. The campaign we would create would mimic theirs in that we would create.
Can either of these examples be applied to your business? “Fart On A Plane” could be perfect for a Net Jets, Magellan Jets, Flex Jets, or a private plane company looking to show the misery of commercial plane travel.
What are the pain points of your business that the audience can relate to?
Video Idea Number 2
“Training Like You Have Never Seen Before”
Have you ever seen “The Bottom of the Ninth?” I’m guessing you have not. It is probably one of the cooler ideas I have seen, but it did not get any traction due to lack of marketing and lack of usefulness.
This style of video is 3D, with 2D elements encompassing a comic book feel.
Take a look:
This style would be perfect for a training video series. Could you imagine being trained by videos and a comic book style pamphlet?
Your audience would not forget it!
They could watch the training video series on their phone, at any time, or they could read the comic style pamphlet. It would be the most effective training ever done on planet earth.
A year or two ago we created a training video for The Cosmopolitan and it was a huge success. I think it is time we push the envelope a bit and really create a training video style that will be recognized by companies all around the world.
We can do this; we just need the right customer to make it happen.
Video Idea Number 3
“Still Coming Up With A Title”
If you have been with Ydraw for a while you will know that we love the Chipotle video.
I have written about it a couple of times before. Check it out below:
They nailed the message and were rewarded with millions of views. We want to create something like this for your company. Once again they took the pain point of the audience and exploited it.
Did you see the poor cow?
Now can you see the challenge that we are facing? We have some amazing writers, Disney animators, and editors, who want to be stretched to the limit.
Currently we are doing a full campaign for National Safety Council. They had the budget and we were able to let our artists create. It has stretched them a bit, but they still have hidden talents that we have yet to see.
Here are some screen shots and scenes.
Let’s chat and discuss ways to make this happen. It’s for the greater good. If these video ideas do not stop soon we might have to start creating them on our own.
It’s our job to build it, and the audience will come… lol
Hope you enjoyed…
The Rise Of Video Marketing Ideas and How To Make It Stop
The Skinny on Making a Big Fat Profit: Mobile Advertising
This article was posted on Business2Community.com by Jessica Anderson
You’ve just sat down to watch TV, and instinctively you search your pockets for your cell phone or your surroundings for your tablet. Sound like a familiar scenario? While TV viewership is on the decline, video viewing on mobile devices is on the rise. According to a survey by YuMe, aside from eating, the biggest distraction from TV watching is web browsing. This means that a large chunk of consumers are just begging to be advertised to while they’re being advertised to! And if your business has been slow to jump on the mobile advertisement train, you’re potentially only grabbing up about half of the audience’s attention. Here are some stats that prove that mobile advertising is the way to go:
Where & How
When it comes to where mobile users watch video, 100% watch from the comfort of their own home. 66% watch mobile video while on vacation, 36% while at a friend’s place, 22% while commuting or at work and 13% while eating at a restaurant. Of these mobile viewers, 65% spend over an hour per day watching video. If you’re not good at math, that’s over 7 hours per week; and if you’re still trying to catch up, that’s almost one third of a whole day! Cue the “I can remember when we used to spend all our free time outside” and all that jazz – but the point is, you desperately need to make your advertising compatible with smartphones and tablets.
Thanks for checking out Ydraw’s blog. Let us know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns for us here at Ydraw. We love hearing from our audience, so drop us a line. You know you want to, and we want you to too!
While our elected officials argue and point fingers, is your message getting to your leads, contacts, and customers?
Unlike Congress, you need to be focused on results, not just making a lot of noise. Can you imagine not having a budget for your company, campaign, or project? You need customers and you need sales, it’s as simple as that. To do that you need your marketing to work for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week and not take extended holidays, costly vacations, or disappear for golf outings every Tuesday.
In today’s online driven world of marketing it’s a numbers game. You need to get in front of as many potential leads as possible, make them listen, entertain them a moment, and most importantly move them to action … for you! To get those numbers, your marketing can’t work like a part time intern. You need workaholics – and I’m not talking about you personally, I’m talking about your marketing materials and content.
How? There are a lot of answers to this question, but here are a few to focus on:
1) Know your customer/audience (or find out… fast)
2) Be where your customers are
3) Keep testing to make sure they like it
1) Know your customer/audience. Sounds easy enough, but have you taken a close look lately at who your customers really are? What keeps them up at night (besides increasing taxes, worthless government programs, and endless debates)? What do they need, and what kinds of questions are they asking to solve their problems? Some of the answers you might be able to pull from past experiences, but there could be some other info right under your nose.
Tip: Go to Ask.com and type in a question or problem your customer typically has. You’ll see a number of questions, related questions, answers and resources all pop up. This is a great snapshot to see what people are asking, what your competition is offering, ideas for your marketing efforts, and how to tailor your message to meet your customers’ needs.
In just a few minutes you can compile some great insights into what’s most important to your customers right now! They might even be asking questions you weren’t aware of, or thought were less important. Just think of how this kind of information can help improve your company’s efforts, and not just in marketing, but in a number of areas.
2) Be where your customers are. If a senator gives a speech and no one is there to listen, did it really happen (and did it really matter)? In political terms it’s often called a filibuster – taking up time, talking about anything or nothing, so the other person can’t speak. You… don’t have that luxury to ramble on. You have a message you need to deliver, and that message needs to reach your target audience.
So… deliver that message where your customers hang out. Again, sounds easy, but it takes a little research to be most effective. How? You need to ask. On web forms, in surveys, even in your everyday sales efforts, make sure you are asking, “How did you find us?
3) Keep testing to make sure they like it. You’re not gonna know what your customer likes without a little testing. And once you have that figured out, you’re going to need to continue to test. Is what they like now the same thing that they liked 5 months ago? Have their tastes changed? Is that same marketing content getting stale to them? Test, test, test…just like high school.
Let us know if you have any questions or comments concerning marketing for us here at Ydraw. As always, we are here to help!
5 Reasons Jimmy Kimmel’s Twerking Girl on Fire Video went Viral – and How Yours Can Too
This article was originally featured on Business2Community.com by Jessica Anderson
Monday night on his show Jimmy Kimmel revealed that he was the genius behind the video that received more than 9 million views in less than a week – Worst Twerk Fail Ever – Girl Catches Fire! In his reveal segment he mentioned that they did nothing to advertise the video, he simply uploaded it to YouTube and, in his words, “Let the magic happen.” However, there are a few key things about the video that helped it get big in the first place – proven methods you can apply to your own videos to boost viewership.
Humor
The public loves funny videos, and Jimmy’s video was hilarious. The fact that it’s an average young college-aged girl makes it relatable, and somehow realizing that it could’ve been anyone tickles our funny bones. Even now, knowing that it was all staged, it is still pretty funny. If you want your video to go viral, it better make people bust a gut and want to show everyone – or at least chuckle a little bit.
In the Now
Viral videos almost always have something to do with current pop culture. It seemed like one day all was relatively normal in the world and the next morning we woke up and “twerk” was in the dictionary. Jimmy Kimmel used this increasingly popular shake-your-booty club move and ran with it. He knew most YouTube users were interested in twerking, wanted to watch it, wanted to learn how to do it, or wanted to just figure out what it was all about. I’m sure if he would have done a “DIY installing a refrigerator – man catches on fire” it would have been funny, but it probably wouldn’t have had over 9 million views in less than a week.
The Unexpected
All the best videos have some sort of unexpected twist. In the case of Twerking Gone Wrong the clincher was Girl Catches Fire. The video would have been great if it ended with the roommate entering through the door and knocking the girl on the ground – but the flames were just the surprise that video needed to send it shooting through inboxes and Facebook pages across the internet.
Title
Of course, if the video would have been titled only “Twerking Gone Wrong” it wouldn’t have been picked up as quickly. If it would’ve been titled only “Girl Catches Fire,” how would people have differentiated it between the hundreds of other YouTube videos entitled “Girl Catches Fire?” The key to the success of Jimmy’s video is the fact that it a couple different mini titles smashed together to let viewers know exactly what is in the video.
Tags
When a YouTube user wants to find a video but doesn’t know the title, they can type in keywords into the search box – and if your video doesn’t have any tags, your video won’t get pulled up in the searches. Jimmy’s video is tagged with several different keywords, including sexy, girl, lady, college, dorm, hot, a**, butt, dance, twerk, twerking, cute, beautiful, shake, university, pretty, fire, accident, fail, epic, vma, robin thicke, miley cyrus, etc… Only a handful of the tags are actually related to the video, and that may seem like cheating – but the beauty of YouTube is that the tags are really hard for viewers to find. So if a viewer was initially searching for “dog obedience classes” they can easily end up watching your online marketing video about which mattress is the best fit or a video of a twerking college girl catching fire.
The Moral of the Story:
Jimmy Kimmel probably wanted to prove to the world how easily a video could be picked up by millions of internet users and even several news stations without doing any extra work beyond uploading it to YouTube. However, he actually did do a little work, and your video has the potential to experience the same success as his so long as you follow the above basic rules of viral videos.
When it comes to video hosting sites, everyone is aware that YouTube takes the cake (ok, so your grandparents are still a little unaware). However, there are other options out there. Here is a list of 5 video hosting sites that will host your marketing video just as well, but still fall in line behind the infamous YouTube.
1. Vimeo
YouTube continually outranks Vimeo because you just can’t beat free. Though Vimeo does offer a free account, there are many restrictions. Their paid account offers several high-tech video editing and hosting options that even surpass YouTube standards.
2. Wistia
If you only have up to three videos, Wistia will host them for free and give you access to all the Wistia features – including their ‘heat map,’ which measures viewer engagement every second.
If you have more than a few videos, Wistia offers a couple different options: for $23/month you can host up to six videos and $79/month gets you unlimited video hosting along with 200GB bandwidth per month.
3. Dailymotion
Despite it’s restrictions – video length is limited to 2GB and 60 minutes and upload quality is limited to 1280*720p – this French video-sharing site is a great competitor to YouTube. Daily motion allows users to watch, upload, and browse videos via tags, channels or groups.
4. Veoh
Veoh is a solid, reliable video sharing site with an added bonus of zero size restrictions. Veoh accepts several different formats and once uploaded, your videos are easy to embed them on your website or blog. There is also an active community where you can connect with other users, rate videos, leave comments and participate in forums.
5. Flickr
It’s true, this popular photo site is not only for images. A free Flickr account allows up to two video uploads per month with 90 second max length and 150MB size restrictions. A paid account giets you unlimited videos, but the same length and size restrictions apply.
