This is an example of a Clio shortlisted ad that is fun to watch and splendidly choreographed. But does it make you want to buy the Beer? ..But in any case, this ad keeps our attention.

Silly, cheap, irritating and effective…Made for a small local market. You are not likely to forget this ad. A video like this may not be appropriate for a CPA firm. But it pulled in business for this Mexican restaurant and the owner of this business had lots of fun in his staring role.

When targeting expensive search terms like “cloud computing” even heavy handed, long winded videos such as this video is more cost effective than Google adwords. For example, the Google Adword phrase “cloud hosting” is currently selling for about $15 per click. This cloud hosting video received over 600,000 views without paying anything to Google. In terms of Google click-throughs, the advertising value of this video is (600,000) X ($15) = $9,000,000.

The stop-motion video has been around as long as film itself, first used in 1897. Some of us remember the California Raisins, an example of claymation stop action. More recently, the technique has been used in Star Wars, Robocop, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Terminator, and The Nightmare Before Christmas, to name a few. Basically you take a series of photos, rather than 29 frames per second that you get on video.

Stop motion is popular on the web, especially in the “in plain English” videos. I like these a lot, as they’re straightforward explanations that inject some humor. Here’s an example of their work.

These videos are done by Common Craft, a mom and pop shop, who now licenses the production out to another firm. The list price for a video like this is about $15K.

Stop motion can be made using a video camera or commonly a progression of still photographs. A great example is “Her Morning Elegance,” which you’ve all heard.  This was shot over 48 hours with 2096 stills using 1 camera angle.

I received this email campaign from Ancestry.com that shows an excellent example of using video in email. The email had YouTube link in it, that took you to this landing page.

STORY is the operative word here. Each of the five 1-minute videos tells stories rather than talks about the features and functionality of the ancestry.com site. The focus of the video is how each person’s search impacted their personal lives.

(Think about impact to a prospect’s personal life as you put together marketing stories. You may not always be able to work that in, but it’s always worthwhile to give it a think.)

The production values in all of these videos are excellent. Interesting shots and angles; beautiful lighting; good use of stills; nice, rich colors. The story starts with the subject wondering about their father, grandfather, grandmother.

We believe that a good video doesn’t try to boil the ocean.  The Mac versus PC ads illustrate this concept. Here’s one that touts a very minor design detail, but as a matter of fact, I killed a computer (a Mac as it happens) before they came up with this design change.

Here’s one that we did for a client in which we wanted to just contrast their type of market research (blog analysis) with a more traditional type of research using telephone surveys.

One of the most effective mechanisms for communicating is telling a story. We’re hard-wired for stories from ancient times. Probably back in caveman times they were telling stories about the hunt, and in Greek times they passed along the historical record through extremely complex stories.

A very early work that we did in 2000—before videos could even be streamed—was a story where the hero was our client’s software.

Here in Silicon Valley, everybody wants to get into features and technology. We convinced the customer to take a step back and think about how their software could impact a person’s life.

This is the result.

One thing that’s interesting in today’s movie script-writing, is that it is structured around a three-act play, again, like the Greeks.

Here’s a good example of a short 10-minute story in a three-act structure that BMW sponsors. These are great. They’re done by top directors, and star Clive Owen as a driver. This first one was done by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the director of the recent film Biutiful, as well as Babel, 21 Grams and Amores Perros. Check ‘em out.

Guys, you’ll like this one. A lot of racing around and shooting guns. Ladies, you’ll like Clive Owen.