I’m always shocked when I go to a company web site that doesn’t have a short simple video of their CEO talking about who they are, what they do and what they believe in. Yet they do have reams of marketing copy, page after page, that explains, in hyperbole, that they’re the leading this, the number one that.
What helps me, as a site visitor, connect more with your company – marketing speak or a video that allows me to see the people, and personality, behind your company?
We recently invited George Wright, Director of Sales and Marketing for Blendtec, the company behind the “Will It Blend” videos, to the studio for a sit down conversation on video as a marketing tool. How does his company spend almost no money on marketing, yet have huge awareness in the market and double digit annual sales growth?
Even Governmental organizations are taking advantage of video’s powerful ability to tell stories and spread virally.
We work with both the NYPD & FDNY to produce engaging video stories around their respective organizations and to then push those videos out through various distribution channels to make sure lots of people within their target audiences watch the video.
We produce a recurring series for the NYPD, called Inside the NYPD, that chronicles units such as the bomb squad, counter-terrorism unit, K9 unit, harbor patrol, aviation unit, and the mounted unit. The video serves as a marketing tool to inspire new recruits and, to a lesser extent, a campaign that targets the general public, which often doesn’t see the inner workings of the NYPD beyond local news coverage of cops shooting people.
We’re currently working on a short web documentary in which we profile the police officers involved in the American Airlines flight 1549 rescue in the Hudson River. The video should be done by the end of this week and available online to watch here.
The smell of jet fuel is strong; the plane is mostly submerged, just showing the blue US Airways tail and the engineless left wing above the water surface. It’s tied with cable and rope to a few trees in the Hudson River Park at the foot of Murray Street in lower Manhattan.
We had access that was not available to any news crews, which was kind of cool.
We also produce each video for iTunes distribution. Inside the NYPD is currently the number one local government download.
We’re now launching a series for the FDNY, simply titled FDNY. Each new episode can be watched here.
FDNY will also be available on the FDNY web site, iTunes, and other distribution outlets to maximize reach.
We’re equipping firefighters with High Definition helmet cameras. So we’ll start to get some amazing footage from inside burning buildings. We really want to provide the viewer with a front court seat.
Engaging video has a unique capacity to spread virally around the Internet. People put the video on their blogs, they link to it and they email people about it. Our job is to make sure the evangelists find it.
