If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a video worth? The answer: Maybe the future of your marketing program, that’s how much. We’ve won a bunch of awards for our Future of Revenue video, and we are proud of that. But inspiration is a far more appealing emotion than pride. So we thought we’d round up several videos that inspire us. In our opinion, these are six of the most brilliant uses of video that we’ve ever seen.
The RSA’s Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Everything changed after this video came out. Simplicity became high art. Visual note-taking became de rigueur. And hands drawing on video hit the mainstream (think: UPS). But nobody has executed this concept as well as Dan Pink, who manages to literally illustrate some pretty heady stuff in a way that is universally understandable. It’s nothing short of inspired.
Boone Oakley’s Homepage
Dig it: The Boone Oakley homepage is a video. On YouTube. Really. Enter what you’d presume to be their Web address (www.booneoakley.com) and see where you are redirected. The video Website doubles as a capabilities presentation for the creative agency. You might be asking yourself: How does someone navigate from one “page” to the next? The player’s timeline doubles as site nav. Genius. (For the record, this is my personal favorite video on this list.)
JESS3’s State of the Internet
This video, the brainchild of creative powerhouse Jesse Thomas, is next-gen storytelling. Thomas and his team at JESS3 are able to trigger laughter, shock and intrigue by using little more than big numbers and small words. It’s the social media version of the film Wall-E, a concept that you don’t think can be pulled off … until you watch. Dozens of companies have tried to bite JESS3’s style. But it took a master’s touch to make it work.
Salesforce.com’s CRM Demo Video
CRM and animation. Not since chocolate and peanut butter have two seemingly dissimilar things fit so nicely together. Salesforce.com knows video because they know what viewers want. We want the lines between entertainment and education to blur. And we want it to happen in about three minutes. They nail it – in a product demo, no less.
Taylor Guitars Responds to United Breaks Guitars
Hat tip to David Meerman Scott for alerting us to this one. How did a small guitar manufacturer generate a whopping 500,000 views of a video about properly packing a musical instrument? Nope, they didn’t turn to skateboarding bulldogs. They used two equally effective techniques: speed (they posted the video within four days of the now-legendary United Airlines guitar-breaking incident) and quality (the advice in the video is immensely informative).
Black & Decker Training Videos
The crowd is always more powerful than the individual. This is a concept that Black & Decker’s training leader Rob Sharpe used to his company’s advantage when he inspired staff to create their own how-to videos, designed to help contractors and DIY’ers make optimal use of Black & Decker’s tools. These videos show that you don’t need a design firm to create game-changing content. You just need to execute.
