Finally people are starting to demonstrate that they understand the value of video media in online marketing campaigns and are willing to take chances on it to enhance an all encompassing online experience.  

(side: sorry for sounding like such an evangelical twit-litist, but I’m invested in normalizing the use of video as one of the obvious staples of online-offline cross promotion so that I won’t have to do freelance for the rest of my life.)

Kraft’s been trying to get in on the ‘joke’ for the past couple of months; hiring Ted Williams (YouTube’s ‘golden voice’) and trying to replicate a more controlled Old Spice video blitz on TBS a few nights ago.  

The NYT even bolstered it’s new video journalist team on today of all days a few hours ago (I wish the paywall was a joke-is the video content part of the 20 or however many views of their free content before you have to pay?):

@nytimes The New York Times  ”For tweets from journalists in the NYT video unit, follow @annderry@matthew_orr @olsentropy #FF”

April fools is kind of a lame holiday offline (playing pranks at work can lead to office drama), but a couple of good online pranks played well, in my opinion.  The above video from Google and the joke on designers (typing helvetica in the search bar makes the font on the screen comic sans).  It wasn’t that funny if you didn’t have to stare at different fonts all day to figure out which works with what theme or whatever.

The most appropriate of all was the last place that floundering momentary celebrities go before their internet fame flat lines-Funny(Today it was Friday) or Die.  The parenthesis after Funny is just in case the site goes back to normal on the day that comes after today but before Sunday.  

These guys went all out.  The address and search bars have lyrics from Rebecca Blacks single and say straight out that this is a Fools prank, just in case you couldn’t catch it from the parody vids on the home page.

Lohan, Sheen (who both also had innuendos with Kimmel, if you know what I’m saying) and even Tequila turned to comedy to lighten the mood around their own controversy to show that they have a sense of humor about themselves.

At least we all have something to laugh about even if you missed it. Fun … Fun … Fun …

Source: mail.google.com

mac and cheese is trying to hit one out of the park like Isaiah Mustafa (the face of the Old Spice hyper-social commercial campaign that brought attention to another YouTube video sharing technique {response videos})-because Terry Crews’ wacky buff guy persona didn’t cross enough demos in his spots, I guess.  It’s not like this is some revelation.

It was a tried and true method of communicating online before Old Spice mashed up twitter and YouTube.  People were already making and continue to make video responses to popular YouTube channels they subscribe to.  ChatRoulette, Skype, and web cams on laptops broadcast people to people all the time.

The revelation is for large corporations like wheat thins and Cisco (maybe not so much), that have begun to understand that involving and highlighting positive customer support through the “social mediums” that they use and turning them into momentary stars makes that company look ahead of the curve or behind it if no one cares.

We’ll see if anyone notices the Kraft campaign tomorrow.  I hope Ted Williams, the Golden Voice, reads peoples tweets or something.

Source: Mashable