I suppose to the “run of the mill” business person the answer maybe a definitive …. NO!

Why you wonder?

To keep it short, this marketing expert/guru approaches problems and situations by normally thinking “outside the box” and is definitely an advocate of change (if you have any doubts, pick up a copy of his latest book “Tribes” and give it a read!).

So anyone familiar with Seth Godin and his work of marketing magic would expect the content on his blog to deliver his message with an equal tone … and he doesn’t disappoint ….

I have only been following Seth Godin’s blog via an email RSS feed for a few weeks and what I have found is a near-constant (every day or so)  flow of marketing magic.

One recent gem delivered fabulous insight about word of mouth advertising (Mechanics vs. intent) and how the desire to deliver the message is more important than the tools facilitating delivery.

Another of his blog entries entitled “Making Commercials for the Web” inspired a re-post on my blog several days ago.  Another marketing gem with insight on things to consider when preparing video commercials to post on video sharing sites like You Tube or other venues.

What’s really cool is that most of Seth Godin’s blog posts deliver his marketing magic jewels in 400 words or less … palatable to the busiest of web surfers ….

Read the post, watch the videos and let me know your thoughts about making video commercials for the web by commenting below!

===============

“TV advertisers are finally discovering that YouTube + viral imagination = free media.

The good news for you is that money is not a barrier, which means that marketers of any size can play. But the rules are different, as they always are online.

Because media is free but attention is not (this is flipped from TV world) you need to make a different sort of ad for a different sort of audience.

1. Assume that the viewer has the attention span of an espresso-crazed fruitfly. That means slapstick, quick cuts and velocity.

2. Find a word or phrase that you can own in Google, that fits in an email, and that comes up in discussion at the cafeteria table or in the playground.

Castrol gets both rules right in this inane commercial.

3. Length doesn’t matter. 10 seconds is fine and so is five minutes. Media is free, remember?

4. Challenge the status quo, be provocative, touch a social nerve or create some other sort of interesting conversation. In other words, a commercial worth watching.

Dove does both in this now-famous commercial.

Because of the power of free media, I expect to see a whole host of commercials that would never be deemed effective enough to spend big media money on, but that generate huge views online. Look for plenty of irrelevant slogans and catch phrases and off strategy content… anything for an eyeball.

Also, understand that this is out of your control. Once launched, what happens, happens. One commercial I know of caught fire and ended up with millions of views. The client then called the producer, screaming in anger. He wanted to be able to turn it off, to decide how it got used, who talked about it, etc. You can’t. Once it spreads, it belongs to the community, not to you.

The biggest shift is going to be that organizations that could never have afforded a national campaign will suddenly have one. The same way that there’s very little correlation between popular websites and big companies, we’ll see that the most popular commercials get done by little shops that have nothing to lose.” (Re-post of  “Making Commercials for the Web – from Seth Godin’s Blog“)