Nothing earth shattering here. No crazy production. No trick camera skills. No dancing babies or flash mobs. While there are some very cool skateboarding tricks, I’m not a particularly big fan of skateboarding. So why did this video appeal to me? I probably just like it because the skateboarding tricks ARE cool, the tempo of them follow the music well and it’s set to one of my all time favorite rap songs. There I said it. Sometimes it’s all about the music and how it moves you or grabs you.

This is the first time I’ve featured an “amateur” produced video on Buzzworthy Wednesday. I use the term “amateur” loosely…but its for a good reason. The video I selected this week is an amazing and beautiful single shot video of the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan. The “Kuroshio Sea” (as this aquarium is called) is the second largest in the world as evidenced by the huge whale sharks, manta rays and large schools of fish swimming.

The song featured, which really sets the tone for this video, is “Please don’t go” by Barcelona. Barcelona credits their song placement in this video with boosting their album and song sales on iTunes and concert attendance. The video is really awe inspiring which is why its recieved well over 1 million views in just a couple weeks.

I mentioned using the term “amateur” loosely because the producer wasn’t specifically paid by the aquarium to make this piece – however Jon Rawlinson the creator is a gifted professional cinematographer and filmmaker in his own right. Perfect song selection matched with the vast open “zen-like” beauty of the aquarium…could the marketing team at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium created a better online marketing video? I doubt it. Enjoy.

Well, I missed sharing my thoughts for the last two week’s Buzzworthy Wednesday Video and I apologize to those of you who emailed and contacted me to find out why there wasn’t a video. I had a very good reason…my wife Leah gave birth to our son Eliot Raymond Guerin on Monday 7/13 at 2:18pm. So I’ve been busy loving and caring for them both.

I’m back to blogging now and in honor of little Eliot I chose the Evian Roller Babies which has had over 8 million views since being uploaded three weeks ago. The video shows the effect that drinking Evian water has on your body. Proof that when you take something cute like babies and set it to a retooled old school rap track like “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang…it’s a winning viral video combo. Maybe it won’t always work…but babies, kittens and puppies or anything else with the “cuteness factor” usually doesn’t steer you wrong when writing a script with viral potential.

So this is an interesting one. It was put out by LaPoste a traditional French mailing company and its had over 480,000 views since it’s upload three weeks ago.

Here’s a case of a poorly crafted viral campaign. The video is definitely geared to a youthful audience showing a Macbook transforming into a jet. Timely considering the release of the most recent Transformers movie.

However, when you go to the landing page they created (bear with me…my French is a little spotty), it’s for their new online service where you can fill out a form and send a registered letter and then have a record kept of the contents of the letter electronically on their site for three years. When you get to the landing page there isn’t even a line of text or link to the video to function as a visual reminder for why you went to the site. No engagement.

This isn’t a service geared to the 20 or 30 something, this is a service geared to the less computer literate crowd most likely from an older demographic who may not know that there are other digital mailing services available. This video has no target for that age group in any way, it’s being viewed by mostly teenage boys and Mac geeks. Don’t believe me? Take a gander at the comments.

So many missed opportunities.

While the video is very entertaining and would be fantastic as a Macbook or Transformers viral video, I feel like LaPoste missed the mark with their audience and their objective for creating the video. Still worth watching though.

Banksy is an infamous British graffiti artist who I’d compare domestically to Shepard Fairey only slightly more mysterious as his real identity is still unknown. He shocked all of England with his his social critical work on buildings and walls throughout London and Bristol including breaking into the zoo to portray his works there. Banksy is following in the steps of US graffiti artist Fairey by exhibiting in the Bristol Museum. Only he took over and turned the entire museum into a giant retrospective type installation of his work.

The news was released just over three weeks ago to great fanfare in the UK being covered by the BBC and garnered over 350,000 views on the YouTube video. All a complete surprise as everyone thought the museum was being closed to film a movie. A brilliant marketing strategy both by the artist and the museum in keeping with the artists shocking methods for displaying his work.

In a rare statement, the artist himself says: “The people in Bristol have always been very good to me – I decided the best way to show my appreciation was by putting a bunch of old toilets and some live chicken nuggets in their museum… This is the first show I’ve ever done where taxpayers’ money is being used to hang my pictures up rather than scrape them off.”

So this week’s Buzzworthy Wednesday Video is actually a web site design. But it’s a video on YouTube. No kidding. This interesting approach to web design was for a creative agency, who chose to build their entire website within YouTube. They utilized YouTube’s annotations and video tagging to create the entire “website”.  The buzz from this “website” has led to more than 370,000 views in a little less than a month.

It’s an interesting concept in terms of online media buzz as it was featured on Creative Culture’s Creativity Top 5 among other blog and online references. I just wonder from a website traffic analytics and general online marketing perspective how much important information are they missing in exchange for this clever approach? All the same, it’s definitely worth checking out.

I’m usually not a big fan of flash mob dance or singing videos, especially as part of a business branding strategy. I get it – the flash mob is a metaphor for community, blah, blah, blah. Chances are unless I know someone in the video, I’m not watching it to completion but if I just watch a few seconds and then click away on most video sharing sites…it is still counted as a view. So if I get a million “views” how many are actually watching to completion or are engaged in my brand?

Nonetheless, this week’s video is a flash mob and probably one of the few I will ever profile because it is very relevant to the subject. This week’s Buzzworthy Wednesday Video is for the “Hammer Pants Dance” promoting MC Hammer’s reality show “Hammertime” airing on the A&E Network following the life of rapper and dancer MC Hammer and his family. The show takes an unprecedented look behind his larger-than-life personality and his life as a business entrepreneur. Hammer, has over 800,000 followers on Twitter and he leveraged his huge social media presence (along with the shiny gold parachute pants wearing dancers in the video) to get over 1.2 million views in 12 days. It was truly a great strategy from A&E and MC Hammer to take advantage of his social media cache and to create a video like this for his connections to share and tell others about the show.

Air New Zealand apparently has absolutely nothing to hide. To illustrate this point the flight crew stripped for the above commercial donning only body paint, don’t worry…it’s office safe viewing. More than 90 Air New Zealand staff members are featured in the campaign, with eight donning only body paint.  In a little over 2 weeks the video has over 1.7 million views on YouTube alone.

Here’s the making of video with quotes and quips from the actual employees who were part of the body painting video shoot (also clean).

Here were a few of the highlights from that post for the automakers to keep in mind and my thoughts on these suggestions:

“83% of new vehicle buyers visit video focused Web sites prior to purchasing a car. This means 31% viewed videos on brand, product or company sites; 24% on auto-specific Web sites, 11% on YouTube; 7%, Yahoo Video; 7%, news sites; 6%, MSN Video; 4%, MySpace; 3%, Facebook; 3%, AOL Video; and 3%, other.”

These numbers from a recent Google sponsored study highlight a few really important factors that automakers need to keep in mind regarding online video and how viewers are searching and researching online. I’d be willing to bet that in a short amount of time YouTube, Yahoo Video, Facebook, etc. will garner a much larger piece of the viewership.

“Don’t skimp on production. A full one-third of auto shoppers watch the video content on the product site.”

So once you have the viewer engaged with a demo of the vehicle, why not lead them to other videos of the same vehicle they are looking at instead of (or maybe in addition to) pages of text information? Maybe it’s crash tests…shown from different angles? Maybe keeping something fragile like an egg inside safe during the crash? You can get really creative here but the object is to keep the viewer engaged and on your site.

Think about Blendtec and how they engaged their viewers by showing them real simple demonstrations of how their blender worked by blending ridiculously common things. Many of those interested viewers became brand loyalists for them.

“Investigate the broader video opportunity. Brand and auto-specific sites only make up slightly more than half of the automotive shopper’s online experience.  Creating a presence on YouTube and other video destinations will help round out the plan.”

Why stop there? While video sharing sites like YouTube are a place that I think the automakers MUST have a presence, what about Facebook, LinkedIn or smaller automobile enthusiast user groups? The automakers could use these brand enthusiasts and interested buyers for research and development. They could find out what features and options people are REALLY looking for in a car. Let the group members participate in the design of new cars, show them videos of new concepts as they are created based on the group’s input and get feedback from the group. Imagine that kind of empowerment could turn them from potential buyers into the automakers brand evangelists.

David Meerman Scott wrote an outstanding post on marketing ideas for the automakers reinvention outlining 5 simple things GM could do to accelerate their hopeful rebound. I hope GM and Chrysler read his post because it had some great ideas. Automakers will be under a watchful eye with their marketing budget, so doesn’t using a tiny portion of their bloated television advertising budget to put a creative online video and social media plan together just make sense? Obviously I think so…what are your thoughts?

Increasing Donations Using Video & E-Mail Marketing

PermissionTV LIVE Episode 15 – Email Marketing with Video

This is episode 8 of a great little animated series on the YouTube channel awomansworld. The series, channel and accompanying website called Only in a Woman’s World are all part of a marketing campaign being done by the FritoLay to promote their “healthier” snacking options such as Baked Lays and 100 calorie snacks, although you’d never know it. The short animations are just little humorous bits that all end with a “brought to you by…” and a teaser call-to-action to visit the Only in a Woman’s World website.

This episode was released a few days ago and already has over 12,000 views. Their YouTube channel is ranked 8th overall for subscribers and is the 8th most viewed channel this month.