Personal Stuff
This is more about the power of packaging (title & thumbnai) than the video itself. After a week this video had ~700 views. I changed the title, thumbnail and description and it did 30k views the next week. Sometimes great content fails because of its packaging.
Formats are wildly overlooked. When I started a guitar YouTube channel, I knew no one would watch because of my playing. So I made it more about the joy/experience of guitar and combined that with funny skits & filmmaking. The comments are fun, too. There’s nothing like building a community around an idea.
Saucony
Super fun series of takeovers.
Crazy story to this one. I was in Montana visiting family when I got a call from an agency I freelanced for. “Hey, do you think you could make something really fast?” Within 24 hours I’d planned and begun a cross-country trip that took me through Montana, Oregon, California, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. From idea to this video in 10 days.
The $16 million video
I’m not really going to take credit for this because it’s a fluke of timing more than anything else. This was a customer story (it’s part of a series) I made for Lowell Five. A guy happened to see this video (I’m not sure which version. These become a bunch of different assets.) and walked into a branch and deposited $16 million! He said, “I’ve been seeing you everywhere, and you seem like good people.”
Cider Monday
What if you hijacked the busiest online shopping day of the year AND pranked the city of Boston? You get Cider Monday.
We announced free drone delivery in Boston for online orders on the Downeast Cider website, which of course is completely illegal. We had press, FAA complaints, a LOT of orders, etc. We also had a bunch of people staring into the sky at Faneuil Hall waiting for drones.
Our drones had propellers, but they were earthbound. We spent a very fun day delivering cider all over the city and absolutely crushed the brief, which was “how do we get the attention of men 20-30 who don’t think cider is cool?”
OMGYN
How do you make a 60-year-old male OBGYN go viral? The whole process is too long for this space, but we ended up doing it quite often. One thing I found during research was exact phrase repeated over and over, “Can I XYZ while pregnant?” So we made that format an ongoing series (among others). “Can I eat sushi while pregnant?” was our first 1 million view video for him, and he’s now at 200,000 followers.
Puzzling
Who knew that picking up finished puzzles was a trend? Well it is. Puzzle nerds go bonkers over them. Here are 2 of 6-7 ads I made for White Mountain Puzzles. I don’t have any numbers for results because they were very difficult to work with so I fired them. All I know is they asked me repeatedly to make more so they must have done ok.