Here’s an example of innovative advertising! Serviceplan Germany built a giant, hand-cranked 3-dimensional organ out of 20,000 LEGO bricks to help promote the 3D version of the Star Wars movie. The instrument toured Germany in January, complete with a QR code. Very creative and true to the brand. Have fun watching.
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The late Edward Rondthaler was a typographist, a simplified spelling champion, and chairman of the American Literacy Council. When he was 102 years old, he recorded this video showing the challenge of properly spelling English. Enjoy.
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This video ad for The Guardian (@guardian) uses the famous fairy tale of “Three Little Pigs” to paint a 21st century picture of open journalism, imagining how the story might be covered in print and online. Follow the story from the paper's front page headline, through a social media discussion and finally to an unexpected conclusion.
In contrast, The New York Times (@nytimes) has created 4 videos that promote the rich experience users get when using its website.
See all The New York Times video ads.
Of the two styles above, which is the most effective? Do they properly reflect each brand message? Does each have viral potential?
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Here’s the latest disrupter in the education field. TED (@TEDNews & @tedtalks) curator Chris Anderson (@TEDchris) announced yesterday that “after more than a year of planning and dreaming, we're finally launching our new TED-Ed website (@TED_ED), whose goal is to offer teachers a thrilling new way to use video.”
...the goal is to allow any teacher to take a video of their choice (yes, any video on YouTube, not just ours) and make it the heart of a “lesson” that can easily be assigned in class or as homework, complete with context, follow-up questions, and further resources.
This platform also allows users to take any useful educational video, not just TED’s, and easily create a customized lesson around the video. Users can distribute the lessons, publicly or privately, and track their impact on the world, a class, or an individual student.
In recent years at TED, we've become enamored of a strategy we call “radical openness”: Don't try to do big things yourself. Instead empower others to do them with you.
This has served us well. Sharing TEDTalks free online has built a global community of idea seekers and spreaders. Opening up our transcripts has allowed 7500 volunteers to translate the talks into 80+ languages. And giving away the TEDx brand in the form of free licenses, has spawned more than 4000 TEDx events around the world.
So it's natural that we would look to this approach as we embark on our education initiative.
Also see The Atlantic’s (@TheAtlantic) article by Megan Garber (@megangarber), “The Digital Education Revolution, Cont’d: Meet TED-Ed’s New Online Learning Platform.”
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you take advantage of new technology to publish and market your brand’s message.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
The New York Times Media and Advertising (@NYTimesAd) section reports on a new public service campaign that seeks to help children “read by bringing together two collections of all-stars: a Who’s Who of literary characters and a lineup of well-known musicians.”
The twin gatherings of familiar faces and voices are meant to underline the theme of the campaign, “Book people unite.” The pro bono campaign is on behalf of Reading Is Fundamental (@RIFWEB), the nonprofit literacy organization founded in 1966.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market content for all ages.
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Launched in 1996, AbeBooks (@AbeBooks) is an online marketplace where consumers can buy new, used, rare, and out-of-print books, “as well as cheap textbooks.” It’s a connection point between shoppers and “thousands of professional booksellers around the world who list for sale millions of books.
One way it markets its brand is through video; lots of video. It’s produced 140 videos so far and offers them on its YouTube channel. Here are 3 examples.
Also see our previous blogposts, “A Video About a Poster Masks a Bookstore's Promotion” and “The 3 Qualities That Make A YouTube Video Go Viral”
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you produce effective videos for your brand.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
The wonder, the art, the magic, the work of creating a printed book — often forgotten in this digital age — is demonstrated in the above video. Filmmaker Glen Milner (@glen_milner) visited Smith Settle bookbinders near Leeds, England, where the owners, Don Walters and Tracey Thorne, allowed him to film the making of the 17th Slightly Foxed (@FoxedQuarterly) book, Suzanne St Albans’ memoir Mango and Mimosa, from start to finish. The Telegraph (@Telegraph) reports:
Here, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at the printing plates, the stitching of the “signatures” (folded sections), the pressing and gluing, the adding of the ribbon bookmark and head and tail bands, the making of the final hardcover in green linen cloth and the numbering of the copies. All of it done with great care, much of it by hand.
The video below on Kottke.org (@Kottke) shows that back before print on demand, laser printers, and the Internet, even machine printing and binding was a time-consuming laborious process, that took teams of people working together to produce just one book.
Just for fun, here’s a video of what the help desk would look like back in the day when print books overtook scrolls.
And, one artist looks at print books and sees a canvas from which to carve art.
Also see our previous blogposts “The Technology of Storytelling” and “Introducing the New Book.”
Whether pbook or ebook, contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you pursue publishing in this digital age.
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Linguist David Crystal describes English as "a vacuum cleaner of a language" — speakers merrily swipe some words from other languages, adopt others because they're cool or sound classy, and simply make up other terms.
Crystal believes every word has a story to tell, even the ones as commonplace as “and.” In his new book, The Story of English in 100 Words, he compiles a collection of words — classic words like "tea" and new words like "app" — that explain how the English language has evolved.
On NPR’s Talk of the Nation (@totn), he tells about the challenge of compiling this list and the idiosyncrasies of the English language.
Read and hear this interview in full.
This interview clearly sets the foundation for the reason the new Common English Bible (@CommonEngBible) was just published: because the digital revolution is accelerating changes in the English language and its everyday usage and understandability. The popular Common English Bible, ranking #7 on the Christian retail bestseller list for April, is necessary to clearly communicate God’s Word since 9,000 new words and meaning revisions are added yearly to the English lexicon. The Common English Bible is today’s freshest translation and uses natural, 21st century English.
Sample the CEB on its website.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you clearly communicate your brand’s marketing message.
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Why would a 2-minute video (created by the Canadian forestry machinery maker Hakmet) of a machine cutting and splitting tree trunks go viral with more than 3 million views? Is it the hypnotic combination of lilting music, buzz saw noise, and captivating visual rhythm? Probably.
It reminds us of another hearty industrial company’s viral video success: Blendtec’s (@Blendtec) “Will it Blend” campaign. The video below of an iPad being destroyed in a blender has more than 13 million views. Wow.
Amber Mac‘s (@ambermac) article “The 5-Video Work Week: How to Build Your Brand On YouTube” in Fast Company’s Co.LEAD (@FastCoLead) offer tips on what makes a video successful:
· The briefer the better; 60 seconds is best
· Content that’s useful to the viewer
· Keep fresh with regular updates
Rico Andrade’s (@andrade_rico) article “The Rise of the Explainer Video” in TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) suggests reasons to create overview videos:
· Increase press coverage
· Help your fans evangelize your product
· Improve the SEO of your site
· Repurpose them everywhere
He says the best explainer videos answer the question “How does this product fit into my life?” or “Why should I use this?” before they answer “How does this work?”.
Also see our previous blogpost “The 3 Qualities That Make A YouTube Video Go Viral.”
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you produce riveting videos for your brand.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
This video, highlighting the history of the WWII British government poster “Keep Calm and Carry On,” has gotten nearly 1 million views in less than a month. The original war slogan was all but forgotten until a poster was discovered in 2000 in a box of books bought by Barter Books (@BarterBooks), a large second-hand bookshop in north-east England. In a bit of alchemy, the store has turned those 5 words into word-of-mouth gold.
Also see our previous blogpost “The 3 Qualities That Make A YouTube Video Go Viral.”
Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you strategically communicate your brand message.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.