14 DAY TRIAL // Online video has so much more potential that the static content people are used to get from their TVs. Yet, five years after YouTube landed, most videos, and ads for that matter, are created in the very same way they always were.
So it's great to see that once in a while, people realize the potential and realize that there's a lot more money to be made if you use a little creativity.
One example that has been very popular for the past few days is an ad for Tipp-Ex, a correction fluid, not exactly the most web-related product. The ad starts off simple enough, with a man hunting a bear. But things get a lot more interesting soon. It's better just to watch the video for the full effect.
The ad is a new type of interactive videos introduced recently by YouTube in which the site along with the video become part of the ad. In this case, users are asked to create their own videos with what they want to see.
The video is originally titled "A hunter shoots a bear," but users can replace "shoots" with anything they want. And there are videos for almost anything you can think of. Yes, including that!
The fun part is discovering what works and what doesn't. While you'll get the occasional "Error 404" video or the "On strike! Won't work!" one, there are a lot things covered.
It's hardly an exhaustive list, but here's some of the things that work:
shoots, dances, kisses, likes, feeds, sleeps with (it's not what you'd expect), tickles, rides, meets, is, plays football with (this one scores high), pee (probably the funniest), kicks, smokes weed with, talks to, plays with, tipp ex, breakdances with, cuddles, goes fishing with, farts with, moonwalks with, plays with, mows the lawn with, buys, eats, washes, does nothing to, moons, watches TV with, jumps, paints.
The list could go on, but you can probably discover a few for your own. Here's the ad itself if you want to jump directly to that. Some of the clips can be NSFW.
The NSFW introduction video