I’m a big fan of YouTube. I’ve always been impressed by the deluge of quality content put out by amateur video producers. As fun as it is, though, I never really thought about the business applications of YouTube until recently.

We all loved show-and-tell in Kindergarten. We got to see what cool new toys everyone else had, and I was always excited to see the newest Transformer my friends had. It was one thing to see a picture of the robot in a magazine, but hearing about all the cool things it could do and actually seeing it transform brought a sense of real-ness to the toy that no photograph could ever reproduce. I can tell you from personal experience that I was more likely to put something I saw in show-and-tell on my Christmas list than something I saw in a Toys-R-Us catalogue.

Things are pretty much the same now. Reading about the new Ford F-150 tells me it exists. Hearing about it on the radio further piques my interest. Watching Dirty Jobs’ Mike Rowe explain how strong the truck’s tow hooks are as it flies around a centrifuge at 60 miles per hour, though … wow …

YouTube gives you the ability to show your products in the same way on your company’s website. You can record a quick video on any camcorder and upload it to YouTube for free. Embedding the video on your website is remarkably easy, letting you integrate your demonstration into the already rich content your site already holds.

I get excited when I talk about the new things I get to do at work and I’m sure you feel the same way. Can you think of a better way to capture this energy and use it to excite your customers?

-Eric Mann

A recent blog post titled, Brand Work is No Job for Ad Agencies, made an interesting case for strategy separate from marketing communications. It got me thinking about a really basic question, are brand strategists even competing with ad agencies? What makes a brand strategy consultant different than an ad agency?

What makes where I work different from an advertising agency is the depth and reach of our brand work within a company. The brand strategy is a set of tools that a company will integrate into every aspect of what they do. It encompasses HR practices, decisions about new products and services, training and budgeting decisions, and even how they answer their phone. The visual identity and marketing campaigns flow from this as well, and in fact many of our clients come in through that door, but it is only a portion of what a company’s brand promise is. We are not trying to compete with advertising agencies but see them as vital partners when we get to that step.

~ Krista Joy Johnson