Commentary
Agency Taps YouTube For Corporate Use
- by Amy Corr , Staff Writer @MediaPostOTL, June 8, 2009
That being said, agencies are searching for a way to tell their story in a non-cookie-cutter format.
We've seen Modernista direct site visitors to its online properties, like its Facebook profile, Wikipedia page, flickr page and YouTube playlists.
Now, BooneOakley, Charlotte, N.C. has turned its Web site into a series of YouTube videos.
Typing BooneOakley.com into a browser now takes you to a YouTube video, deemed the BooneOakley.com home page. The main video tells the story of Billy, a marketing director who meets a tragic demise because he chose a run-of-the-mill agency to create his company's ad campaign.
The video concludes with snippets of the agency's print, TV and online work. The main video contains four embedded
links that bring visitors to different parts of the agency site, or, in this case, different YouTube videos. Work by client; work by medium; news, bios, etc. and contact us lay out company information in separate YouTube videos. The agency vision video is a must-watch.
Navigation isn't what I'd call user-friendly; once you're finished watching an embedded link, you essentially have to start from the main page, unless what you want to watch can be found on the previous video. Users can click on the previous video link or begin at the home page.
The home page had generated 201,777 views as of this morning, with various sub-videos collecting anywhere from 4,488 views to 30,477. It took the agency two months to build the site.
"We figured the best way to tell our story was to make our Web site one," said Jim Robbins, copywriter at
BooneOakley. "Our original idea was to do so by making our site a single video that could live anywhere on the Web. But soon we realized that YouTube's embeddable annotations granted us the
opportunity to create something much bigger," continued Robbins.Expect the site to remain as is for the foreseeable future, with new videos to be added regularly.
According to Robbins, overall site feedback remains positive. "We knew being on YouTube could help us, but we didn't know just how much Twitter would help. The advertising community was slightly more critical, as we expected. But they also weren't our target. One major benefit of building a site on YouTube is that it becomes a part of a community, something that is more accessible to the general public," concluded Robbins.
The Web site even generated a video response, in BooneOakley format, from Jason Rapport, an unemployed agency creative whose response served as a video resume. Rapport said the video took six hours to create and he was contacted by BooneOakley, but unfortunately, the agency isn't hiring. Hopefully, someone else is.
Amy Corr is managing editor, online newsletters for MediaPost. She can be reached at amyc@mediapost.com.
I think the effort is rather sad and I don't like the punch line in the "Billy" story. "All the other work, from all the other companies, owned by same four companies" We've enough violence, and a pointless joke about murder isn't funny, or ironic, it's rather ugly. Hardly what I'd consider daring at all.
Then again, this is exactly the kind of sophomoric humor one would expect from four middle-aged white men stuck in Charlotte with a case of beer on the table. As for the work: some clever, some derivative, in total, "average." The use of YouTube is again, hardly daring, just a concession to the times. (Although I did like the the play on The One's, even though it's a mash up of; an episode "The Simpsons" executed in a style made famous by Monty Python. In all, good but unexceptional work, by a group of self-regarding men with decent resumes, but who can't, in search of inspiration, go out on a whim visit Chinatown or MoMA, enjoy the sight of the most beautiful women in the world going about their business, or wonder at some of the greatest works—in all media— created by the human mind, hand and spirit in the last 200 years. Enjoy Charlotte boys, and keep your hands on your One Show annuals, which seems to me your window on the world.