Experimenting with Youtube Channels

Last week each of us were assigned the task of creating Youtube channels. And this is the result. Which do you rate the best? Which do you rate the worst?

Ahila - Ashues 26
Bhavna - Bhavna3112
Jaideep - BT Insight
Jaikumar - Rage Cricket
Lavanya - 87 Lav
Mallika - Mallika Rodrigo
Rajesh - Channel 7
Sampath - Nimbus 3D
Shobhana - Sonuph
Sornavel - SRM Anthem
Suresh - No Pain! No Gain!
Tanuja - Jacko 58

Effective Engagement: Lesson From Hollywood

Attention is fleeting. Momentary. This simply means that you only have that ‘moment’ to engage. And for effective engagement, we could take inspiration from the movies. They do a real good job of it.

You must have noticed fleeting moments in movies that lingered on even days after you've watched the movie. Moments that were so 'momentary', so short lived but powerful in their impact. Let's take the movie Gladiator for instance. What are the fleeting moments of maximum impact that come to mind?

- The severed head rolling to a stop in the opening battle scene
- Blood mixing with water as Russell Crowe washes his hands after the battle

You can go on and on. If you watch the movie again you'd come up with many more such fleeting moments. The thought, however, is this:

If you want your prospect to click on a banner, or press the replay button, wouldn't fleeting yet arresting visuals that are relevant, that tell a story and answer a need, prompt the desired action? The keyword here is 'fleeting'.

And we're talking visuals only here because copy can never be fleeting.

Question: Is this the answer to effective engagement and immediate action by the viewer? The use of powerful, fleeting imagery that weaves a quick story, without copy interruption or only the most minimal copy display?

New comers on board

In a sudden development we had more people join us. All from creative of course! In any case our conference room is big enough to hold an army. (Ok, a platoon, maybe.) For the sake of the new comers there was an 'orientation'. And that's that.

Next week, we'll be back to business as usual. Each of us will be presenting channels that we've made on Youtube.

Transformers - The Weenies

Aatchees made this five-legged wire head.

See that fuzzy head. We clicked it in time, before the transformation... What do you think it transformed into?

A squirrel in office!

There's this fellow in our conference room. Hiding among all the wires and circuitry or behind the sofa, in turn. Wonder how he got in there. Maybe the next time we spot him we'll have our cameras handy.

Ok, I'll do it. Please pass me my wine!

On 3rd July, we were supposed to discuss the winning entries (Grand Prix only) at the recently concluded Cannes Festival - Dark Knight, The Best Job in the World and Fiat Eco Drive.

It wasn't to be. Technical glitches... the less said the better. So we went on a tangent. A question was put on the table. "What if you were to do an advertisement or piece of communication for crab meat and you are a vegetarian who loathes even the mention of meat, let alone crab meat? How would you communicate effectively without even knowing what the product is?"

We had vegans among us who were already looking a bit put off. But they finally came around, perhaps in the spirit of the discussion and smug in the thought that this was just make-believe. What they came up with is in picture one. One actually said she'd eat it. We believe you!

Done with the shell fish, we moved on to wine. When it came to wine, most of us weren't ga-ga about it. Some liked it, some hadn't tasted it. And what if we had to promote a brand of wine, would we be able to do justice to it with all our not so ga-ga impressions about wine? That called for another animated round of discussions.

The answer might be elementary to most - but then what if some among your team haven't even considered communication on these lines? It's a 'bingo-moment' for them, a moment that one hopes would be significant enough to reflect in their work from then on.

A Photoshop quiz and a farewell

June 26, Friday, was Kavitha's last Friday Morning Meeting day. She's been with us over a year now and as a farewell of sorts, we had a special meeting. The agenda for the meeting was suggested by Kavitha - a Photoshop quiz. On the day of the meeting though, the quiz became a forum as you can see in the pictures above.

The Visualizers picked up a couple of tricks from each other. Maybe we need to have such meetings once in a while too. We wound up with a song from Kavitha.