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Corporate Video Awards

CORPORATE DIVISION, VIDEO CATEGORY

Website: www.cobrandit.com; www.flyingdogales.com

The Challenge
Flying Dog is Denver's largest craft brewer and a national brand in growth mode. Their unique history, culture, and approach needs to be regularly communicated in a compelling, dynamic, and authentic voice that weaves together everything from technical information (about how they brew) to lifestyle events (parties, sponsorships, road trips). They want to bring their off-line reality online to an audience of home brewers, artists, free-thinkers and beer drinkers who participate in social media forums and communities.

The Ingenious Proposal
Flying Dog decided to add the aspect of video to their already successful in-house blogging and social media program. Flying Dog aims to be the most web 2.0 savvy craft brewer in the world. They want to create content that shows the world who they are and allow them to share and integrate their activities with those of their audience. They want to provide tools that allow online community members to both talk about them and with them in a number of different forums and spaces. They want to constantly seek out new platforms and modes of expression and distribution. Wherever people go online, they want to be "discovered."

The Call
Flying Dog approached coBRANDiT, a social media and marketing agency and consultancy which specializes in web video for online communities and opt-in environments, when they decided to beef up their in-house blogging and social media program with video. Flying Dog's marketing strategy is to "leverage our intrinsic values", Flying Dog feels those values are best exemplified by their employees and the brewery founders. Video is the perfect way to show and tell an online audience what Flying Dog is all about, and the tools for distributing it (blogs, widgets, RSS) make online participation easy and more dynamic. For 2007 Flying Dog instituted a bi-weekly video program. coBRANDiT shoots video on location in Colorado every 3-4 months and then edits the material into 3-4 minute web shorts. The content includes brewery tours, talks with their founders, the company ski retreat, drinking games, parties, and road trips. coBRANDiT prepares and distributes the videos on YouTube and Blip.tv, and set up a vlog with tools and feeds that bring the video out to iTunes, digg, springwidgets, top video search engines and their various blogs and newsletters and any other place that you can drop a feed or widget into. Flying Dog maintains a handful of blogs and is active on sites such as MySpace and squidoo; these videos and video tools can be embedded in their sites and profiles and are automatically updated whenever coBRANDiT posts a new video. In 2008 Flying Dog plans to involve arts organizations, foodies, groups and individuals by including events they organize with them in the series. The hope is they'll pick up on the content and spread it around themselves. Flying Dog will publicize this off-line activity not only in the video series, but also in their traditional advertising, POS, and packaging. coBRANDiT is helping Flying Dog strategize this next phase of planning.

The Success Story
For Flying Dog, 2007 has been a year of experimentation. Flying Dog has tried a lot of things in the social media space and they're not easy to measure. Their mailing list (the main way Flying Dog currently publicizes the video series, among other things) is growing. Flying Dog has put calls to action in some of the videos to drive traffic to squidoo polls. Flying Dog has gotten many comments from bloggers and beer writers about their social media and video presence. ABC did a story on them. Web traffic to their main site, to their video blog, and to other pages (MySpace, etc.) are trending up. Most importantly, Flying Dog beer sales are up. Being active in the social media space doesn't seem to be about doing one thing perfectly, it's more about trying many related things, and having the marketing programs, content, and tools available to generate commentary and involvement. Video is a great way to do that, but it only works if you've got a good story to tell and the right kind of voice telling it. coBRANDiT has helped Flying Dog find that voice, and bring it out.

CORPORATE DIVISION, VIDEO CATEGORY

Website: www.coca-cola.com

The Challenge
On June 6, 2006, The Coca-Cola Company, and Diet Coke were rocketed into consumer-generated media by a three-minute epic video, Experiment #137, a low-fi feat of ingenuity that mashed theatre and science and yielded Bellagio-styled Diet Coke geysers. Steve Voltz, one of the creators and participants in the video, told one person, his brother, about the video on EepyBird.com, and then he went to the Oddfellow Theatre in Buckfield, Maine to perform that night’s show. On Monday, David Letterman was calling, and the rest is viral video history. For Coca-Cola and for Mentos, it was the moment when consumers took over the respective brands. What is the most valuable mark in the world to do? How could it take advantage of a viral phenomenon without draining it of its authenticity? What could EepyBird do as a second act? And how could viral success translate to business success? The hit video posed problems for EepyBird and for Coke.

The Ingenious Proposal
Coca-Cola and EepyBird formed a partnership, and came up with a dual campaign resulting in a win-win situation. Coca-Cola’s goals were to drive engagement through time interacting with the brand with video views, video commenting, and video forwarding, to drive traffic to the new Coca-Cola.com, a site devoted to consumer-generated video contests, and to demonstrate an awareness and savvy within emerging technologies, as evidenced by coverage in the press. For EepyBird, the goals were to monetize the tremendous viral success of their content in an environment where consumer-generated video only made hosting sites revenue, and to partner with a platform who could withstand the onslaught of Web traffic generated by the hit content.

The Call
On July 09, 2006, Coca-Cola launched its first-ever global consumer site, Coca-Cola.com, 100% devoted to the function of consumers uploading, sharing, and rating videos. In the weeks that followed, Coca-Cola and EepyBird formed a partnership that saw the company fund production of additional videos, contests, and live events. Today the partnership continues, and spans EepyBird’s developmental projects and continued touring. The longevity of the relationship is due in part to the fact that Coke’s investment has not simply been in the literal translation of EepyBird’s geyser work, but also in recognizing the underlying opportunities “there are more Experiments to be had in a variety of everyday things being made to behave in extraordinary ways. There is life after geysers.” The jointly-sponsored Poetry in Motion campaign illustrated the point: Experiment #214. Coke sponsored EepyBird’s second major viral video release, while maintaining creative agnosticism. The result was a second smash hit that has been viewed over six million times, and continues to close in on its forerunner’s numbers. Distributed through Google Video, no activation was performed other than the teaser video and the actual release onsite. In fact, Coke ran Google’s first ever in-line advertising within Experiment #214 for its Poetry in Motion contest. Coca-Cola.com hosted a contest designed by EepyBird, in which consumers created and submitted videos of ordinary objects doing extraordinary things. Again, no PR or activation was performed “we simply relied on the viral effect of the videos explaining the contest.” The winner was flown to Buckfield to collaborate with EepyBird on their next video release.

The Success Story
Experiment #214 and Poetry in Motion used both the new online video technology and equally important, new online video culture, to create innovative commercial content for broadband that succeeded in solving difficult problems both companies were facing. Experiment #214 had over 6 million views, was the #1 shared link among teens for 3 straight months, the #1 video on Google Video Top 100 for 9 straight days, and the #31 viewed video of all time on Google Video. EepyBird was able to partner with a financial backer who allowed them total creative control, ownership, and production technique. EepyBird and Coke set precedent for a corporate/amateur content producer relationship that genuinely benefitted both parties. The Experiment’s videos won a Webby and were nominated for an Emmy. Coca-Cola doubled its site traffic and realized tremendous media efficiency.

CORPORATE DIVISION, VIDEO CATEGORY

Website: www.ibm.com/soa, www.bpmroi.techweb.com
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxKLwobDLvY&eurl

The Challenge
Process improvement is a critical component to service-oriented architectures (SOA), however modeling a business process is an area that may be considered somewhat dull. IBM wanted a fun and creative way to show students, IT teams and business leaders in an organization that creating a business process doesn’t have to be dull.

The Ingenious Proposal
Using the format of a movie trailer is an innovative way to use the web as a canvas to paint the picture of how users can develop a business process. IBM created Innov8, a new video game designed to bridge the gap in understanding between IT teams and business leaders in an organization. The medium of the game and its sneak preview video on YOUTUBE are designed to draw the viewer in and demonstrate modeling a business process in a way that is easy to understand and fun. This concept of using a game as a learning tool for software technology is innovative in software technology, and IBM is one of the first to market this. The game, which was announced at IBM’s Impact 2007 conference in May 2007, is described by Business Week magazine as a tool to "help tech managers better understand the roles of businesspeople, and vice versa, players go into a virtual business unit to test their hand at ventures such as redesigning a call center, opening a brokerage account, or processing an insurance claim.”

The Call
Innov8 is a sneak preview of a video game that puts a businessperson in a virtual office to the task of constructing a more efficient company. The game is meant to address how organizations can improve a company's internal business processes. Process improvement includes designing software for a series of linked, modular business services. The software for modeling and deploying these designs is called business process management, or BPM. The marketing strategy is to make the video "movie trailer" for the game available on YOUTUBE and the BPM ROI website (www.bpmroi.techweb.com) to spark interest in the "coming attraction," the actual game. In the game, a person is given a series of tasks from the CEO, including understanding a single business process, then finding the bottlenecks that slow it down. Participants will use a joystick to navigate around a virtual office where they can speak to other employees—i.e., in the call center operation--and report back to executives. In the end, workers will be assessed with a score on how well they did. The game has been previewed at industry events and trade shows.

The Success Story
The game trailer on the www.bpmroi.techweb.com site has garnered over 6 million impressions to date. With this number of web impressions, we believe interest in the actual game (released in early October) will be high. The number of visitors to the web page map to the program objective of creating interest in the release of the Virtual INNOV8.

CORPORATE DIVISION, VIDEO CATEGORY

Website: www.waggeneredstrom.com, www.microsoft.com
Video link: http://www.microsoft.com/winme/0704/29897/Beta_3_Video_2_MBR.asx

The Challenge
With several months to go until Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 was released to manufacturing, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide’s PR efforts for Microsoft centered on the following: 1) Creating early momentum with interim code milestones; and 2) Building anticipation for the final product. With heavy pressure from competing Linux and VMWare product solutions, Microsoft wanted Windows Server 2008 to remain top-of-mind with key audiences and show what beneficial features were coming. Toward that goal, Microsoft desired large-scale awareness for beta 3, encouraging extensive downloads and evaluations globally. The challenge was to build excitement around Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Beta 3, encourage customer evaluations, excite partners, and demonstrate that the Microsoft Server team has a sense of humor, all at the same time.

The Ingenious Proposal
Anecdotal evidence from press and influentials noted the limited fun-factor of Windows Server announcements and activities compared with more creative and flashy ideas for consumer products. Combining this perception with the fast-moving nature of viral videos Waggener Edstrom had seen propagate digitally, they wanted to merge these two worlds and embraced the challenge. They set out to try a new communication and story-telling vehicle that demonstrated Microsoft’s sense of humor while still delivering a very pertinent message to our primary audience: IT pros. They secured broad-reaching, public distribution vehicles and video sites to maximize the receiving audience for the film. Waggener Edstrom set the following specific and measurable metrics for the video’s reach: 8+ blogs pick up and link to the video, 12,000 views in first 30 days, and the video would be used in at least one public Microsoft function. In addition to these business goals, the Microsoft client overseeing Windows Server PR, Bob Visse, put forth a specific challenge to Waggener Edstrom’s team -- he wanted to see some new PR tactics that were edgy, but low-risk. They took this fine-lined directive to heart, started brainstorming, and seized the opportunity to wow him. Beyond the more traditional PR tactics (not described in this case study) they wanted to bring a bit more sizzle to the traditionally dry topic of Server technology. With the help of Waggener Edstrom’s Digital Strategies Group they brainstormed on video ideas, developed a compelling and humorous script, and worked closely with clients, partners, and film crew on execution.

The Call
Load the head of product development into a biplane and have him drop beta 3 DVDs out of it...or at least make it look that way! Through creation of a viral video timed with Beta 3, Waggener Edstrom supplemented traditional PR tactics, generating both global awareness and smiles. The video, starring Microsoft’s Iain McDonald, illustrated absurd ways to distribute code -- ultimately encouraging downloads by customers, ISVs, and OEMs. Their strategic solution delivered the following three-part process. Concept: The video ideas brainstorm at the agency included a broad cross-section of teammates; attendees included Microsoft Server and Tools business team members and Digital Strategies Group team members. Production: Proposal, video script, and proposed metrics were delivered to clients for review and budget approval. With a finalized script in hand, Waggener Edstrom approached Iain McDonald about his participation. With his agreement, the team hired a film crew, created a filming schedule and brought together the necessary props. Distribution: Waggener Edstrom delivered the final film to Microsoft global subs so they could localize it (voice-over or subtitle) as needed. Video sites like YouTube and MetaCafe, as well as Microsoft.com provided broad online distribution of the video. A generic version of the film was also given to select partners for customization. The following are two hurdles they faced and overcame: Filming Schedule: The client and video’s main character, Iain McDonald, had such a tight schedule that filming was permitted for only one day. Meticulous scheduling allowed the bulk of the shots needed, but other shots were achieved by the use of a body-double who donned Iain’s clothes. Partner Exposure: Clients specified the video would show Iain delivering beta 3 to each of the four key partners (HP, Dell, Intel and AMD). This way, each partner could use the video on their own if they wished. The team offered a creative solution: Rather than filming Iain going physically to each partner site, the miracle of video editing created the illusion he visited all four since logoed DVDs disappeared from his briefcase one by one. This also helped the video duration remain short.

The Success Story
By the end of the beta 3 campaign, Waggener Edstrom exceeded all metrics. Microsoft experienced over 300,000 downloads of beta 3 code, nearly 17,000 online views of the video (numbers continue to increase), 32 blogs, publications and other outlets linking to the video, increasing exposure to IT pros, video usage during two Microsoft event keynotes (U.S. and Tokyo) reaching thousands, and the video was adapted for use in several countries & languages.

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