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Sharethrough.TV Week in Review: Google, Duracell, Toyota and Old Spice Bring the Creativity

This week’s Week in Review features four of America’s most well known brands: Toyota, Google (twice), Duracell, and Old Spice. These videos do a great job of showcasing how creative top brands have become with online video.

In Toyota’s “The Ex”, Saatchi & Saatchi provides us with a humorous, stereotypical ex-girlfriend character, while also creating a broader story line that their target demographic will likely resonate with. Google, who rolled out possibly their most disruptive product in the last half decade (Google Fiber), created a video that aims to make viewers experience how internet speeds were in the past, present and how they will be in the Google Fiber future. It’s a slow build that delivers a lightning fast ending.

And then there’s Jay-Z. Duracell used the hip hop icon to power up their newest ad for Powermat. It’s just cool. As only a Jay-Z commercial should be.

Enjoy the videos below. If you are left wanting more, pop over to sharethrough.tv to watch our full library of the best brand videos.

The Ex

Brand: Toyota
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi

No matter how tired certain concepts are, if you execute well, it can work. This video exemplifies that. The ex-gf, ex-bf bit has been played out in seemingly every possible way, but this video quickly takes a funny turn, plays it light and cool and then knocks it out of the park with a perfect ending.

The Next Chapter of the Internet

Brand: Google
Agency: Venables Bell & Partners

An epic model installation introduces Google Fiber which provides internet speeds 100x faster than current broadband rates. As The Cars “Just What I Needed” comes into tune, the video plays on the old promise of the internet as superhighway. Unfortunately, this is just rolling out in Kansas City, but hopefully it signals the beginning of an even faster internet.

Day in the Life

Brand: Duracell
Agency: Woods Witt Dealy & Sons

Duracell bought Powermat and rolled out a new ad featuring Jay-Z. Check out who gives him a ring at the end…

Google Play Tests

Google’s in-house video production division, Studio G, has released a series of videos over the course of the past 6 weeks explaining the features of Google Play. (You may have seen some of them.) The features are so simplistic they don’t really need explanation, but apparently that’s kinda the point in this series of videos done by Wes Anderson’s fan club.

Brand: Google

I Will Live Forever

Brand: Old Spice
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy

Old Spice continues with their self-help “Believe in Your Smelf” campaign, this time with a scrawny kid willing himself to limitless Olympic gold and immortality.

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Diet Coke, Skittles and n00b DollarShaveClub.com turn up the zany

Viewers aren’t terribly complicated people… we just want to be entertained. And while there are a number of ways to achieve that, a great many brands shoot for humor–specifically humor of the strange variety.

Thanks to the successful and popular ads over the last few years from companies like Old Spice & Skittles, “weird humor” is all the rage.

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Video Ads Teasing Video Ads

Online video ads are gaining prominence, and beginning to become their own new content variety. Want proof? We’re now seeing brands creating entire online video campaigns that exist solely to tease another upcoming online video campaign.

Take Volskwagen, whose “The Force” from last year at ranks as one of the most successful online video campaigns in history. If you’ve somehow managed to avoid seeing it before now, here it is:

That ad originally appeared online a few days before last year’s Super Bowl–where it also aired. And this year, the car company has another big Super Bowl ad up their sleeves, and it seems it will again involve Star Wars in some way. How do I know? They’re teasing the ad with another ad–one featuring a chorus of dogs barking out the Imperial March–and the teaser ad has already gone viral:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ntDYjS0Y3w

Volkswagen isn’t the only brand to use online video as a teaser for a larger online video campaign. Old Spice did the same thing with their Fabio Vs. Old Spice Man campaign in an attempt to drive interest in the one-day video extravaganza. Here’s their teaser:

Of course, using online video to tease a piece of content isn’t new… movie studios have been among the earliest adopters of that form of marketing. Like The Dark Knight Rises, which has already found over 11 million viewers in one month–and we’re still seven months out from the film’s release!

What’s new about the trend is that brands are now using online video to drive interest in future online videos. And that signifies a huge leap in the legitimacy of online video as a destination format for branded entertainment content.