It's no secret that video is an effective advertising technique. There's nothing else quite like video. It can pull customers in, grab their full attention, and provide essential information all within the span of a few seconds. Indeed, all the most successful companies spend millions of dollars advertising on televisions. Facebook video ad spending is exploding, as well.
Of course, part of what makes video marketing powerful is its content. A boring video will not help your brand image. It must showcase your product in a creative, intelligent way. It should inspire customers and give them a strong positive sentiment towards your product. These are the ads that people share on social media, and people remember 5-10 years later.
If you're looking for inspiration for your video marketing campaigns, here are six of the best product video marketing campaigns. There's a good chance at least one of these will inspire you!
GoPro: A Hero in Action!
There's a common misconception that product video advertisements need to sell a product directly. In other words, people believe that these ads must describe the product, tell customers where to buy or how to buy it, and center the whole ad around the product itself. However, as the GoPro campaign showed, that's not necessarily the case.
GoPro is synonymous with high-adrenaline, risky behavior. Some people buy a GoPro to show people what it's like to perform tricks on a skateboard, go biking, and have fun on other adventurous tasks. A GoPro is strong, durable, reliable, and it gives you a first-person point of view. That makes it fantastic for people making content about exciting situations.
Through its ads, Gopro gives a glimpse into raw adventure and entices the viewer to join in on the lifestyle.
The video campaign, "A Hero in Action," was creatively unique. It showed a much more human side to GoPro by showing a firefighter using it as they're saving a cat's life. This campaign's emotional aspect allowed it to go viral quickly, and it helped people realize that GoPros weren't just for skateboarders or bikers. When you show the world your perspective, no matter what you're doing, it matters. And GoPro used a real video recording of a firefighter wearing it to showcase this product's powerful capabilities.
Emotional connection is one aspect in which videos can truly excel. You can connect with someone reading a blog post or connect with images, but you'll never quite get the same depth of connection you can achieve with video ads. GoPro's campaign masterfully showed how a simple video of saving a cat's life could be one of the world's best product video marketing campaigns!
Vat19: Curiously Awesome Gifts Make for a Great YouTube Channel!
Imagine making a short, 1:49 video about kinetic sand and having that viewed by over 111 million people. Does that sound too good to be true?
It's not. The marketing geniuses behind Vat19 did just that with their video entitled "The Original Kinetic Sand by Brookstone."
What are some of their other top videos? With 87 million views, "World's Largest Gummy Worm," comes in next. At 78 million, you'll get the amazing "We got into a bathtub full of Liquid Gass Thinking Putty."
Many of their videos have at least 2-3 million views. Many of them even have over 10 million, and they have 7.6 million subscribers.
That's the power of funny, unusual videos.
But enough about their stats, many people might be wondering: what makes these videos so successful?
Unlike GoPro, which used the emotional element to draw viewers in, the people behind Vat19 use uniqueness to catch viewers' attention. There aren't many videos online where you can see the world's most gigantic gummy worm, a 3,000 lb Jello cup, or watch people make a burger out of 37,000 gummy bears.
These are the types of videos that draw attention and make for a high click-thorough-rate percentage. Then, at the end of each video, they put their website up and give people a link to buy the product they were watching. It's a great marketing system and has single handedly turned a quirky concept into a powerful selling platform!
Dollar Shave Club: How One Video Can Make a Startup Successful
The Dollar Shave Club ad has over 27 million views on YouTube. This fun and intriguing ad take people on a tour of the company's warehouse while poking fun at the annoyances that shavers face every day.
If you watch the video, you'll probably enjoy it, have a couple of laughs, and you may not think about it too much. There isn't some profound lesson to learn about razors or even a significant emphasis on the product itself (although you see it in the video). Instead, this video took a different approach. It used humor, strong connection/bonding with the viewer, and a relatively fast-paced ad to promote the startup.
This video ad quickly became viral. The Dollar Shave Club guys spent $4,500 making the ad, and it took one day to shoot. Four years later, the founders sold The Dollar Shave Club to Unilever for $1 billion.
What's even more impressive is that the video hit 5 million views just 90 days after the founders posted it. And, 12,000 new customers signed up for the monthly subscription service within two days.
Not bad for a $4,500 video! The moral of that story is that video advertising is almost always worth the investment - and it doesn't necessarily cost a large amount of money. Sometimes, with the right video crew and a bit of luck, the ROIs on videos can be incredible.
Gillette: The Best Men Can Be
Created in early 2019, another razor company, Gillette, created an advertisement that took a different approach than the Dollar Shave Club founders (Gillette does, after all, have a lot more money). As you may know, the company's take line is "The best a man can get." Mid-2019 had a substantial amount of discussion around the #MeToo movement, and Gillette wanted to create an ad that encouraged men to be the best that they can be. There's no sales pitch for a particular razor in this ad, but it is obviously from Gillette and encourages users to visit a Gillette-branded website.
It's sometimes a little risky for a company to put out an ad on social issues, but this one was well-received, garnering nearly 36 million views since it came out on January 13, 2019. It had a tremendous amount of engagement as well, with over 400,000 comments on YouTube alone.
Advertisements like this show how powerful video can be at portraying corporate values. Gillette took a positive, powerful stance against bullying and harassment. Even though there isn't one single product featured, it generates quite a bit of goodwill for customers. It will get people thinking about Gillette razors because they know they're buying from a company that shares their same core values.
Training Mask 3.0: Bring on the Intensity
Given that this ad features masks, you might think it came about as part of the COVID pandemic. However, the company, Training Mask, created the ad as part of a 2017 campaign. The mask uses technology to apply variable levels of load to your respiratory muscles. It helps you condition your breathing so you can exercise longer and defeat fatigue.
This short, one-minute ad has virtually everything you could want. The lighting, colors, and intensity show precisely what this mask is for and why someone wants to buy it. There's no mistaking that this mask is for working out and for improving your breathing. The music is also perfect, pumping people up and getting them ready for a workout!
Pro-football player, Marshawn Lynch, uses the Training Mask and its quality is evident from the video. One of the essential things to remember about this ad is that it's a niche product for a niche audience. Most people are happy to work out on the treadmill and do the elliptical for a little bit at the gym. This product's target market is the people that truly need to push their bodies to the max.
Despite this niche, the Training Mask video garnered 1.5 million views on YouTube - not bad for a $70 product with a relatively limited audience! This video ad is an excellent example of the traffic and interest showcasing a product's uses in an entertaining minute of video can bring. Even with relatively niche products, video is still one of the best ways to reach prospective customers!
Redsbaby BOUNCE 2016 Model
The ad for the Redsbaby BOUNCE is an old one, but one that's worth watching if you're looking for inspiration on how to create an innovative, powerful ad that showcases a product. The product in this ad is a stroller. It has a detachable seat, foldable capabilities, storage capacity, and much, much more. Nowadays, many mid-range strollers have these capabilities, but back in 2016, it was a little harder to find ones that had all these features.
What's so powerful about this particular ad is how it seamlessly shows every single feature that this stroller has. It showcases a woman coming out of the house with her baby in the detached seat part and the rest of the stroller, folded. Once she gets outside, she puts the seat in the stroller and proceeds to walk her kid to the park.
You might be thinking, "that's not exactly the most exciting content!"
But, along the way, text pops up on- screen showing every single feature the stroller has. One scene reads, "adjustable handlebars for all heights." Another highlights the canopy that the parent can put down, including the peep window, to ensure that baby is ok. When the mom walks over bumpy terrain, the viewer sees that the stroller is "suitable for all-terrain use" and has "robust four-wheel suspension."
By the end of the two-minute video, you'll see all the benefits of the stroller within a beautifully straightforward narrative. What makes this ad incredibly good is its relatability. All these features are beneficial when walking your kid to the park. And, as any parent can attest, putting your child in a stroller to walk somewhere close by is a near-daily occurrence! The video's point that this stroller has all these beneficial features for something that any parent is almost assuredly going to do is an excellent sales tactic.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this video has gathered over 1.1 million views on YouTube. That might not sound like a lot, but the parent company, Redsbaby, is Australian. So 1.1 million views out of a population of approximately 25 million people is an awe-inspiring feat!
Sometimes videos don't need complex storylines to be effective. Often, letting the product do the talking is the most effective way to convince someone to buy it!
Promotional Product Videos Can Benefit Your Business Substantially
It's not an overstatement to say that having a high-quality promotional product video can take your business to new heights. The Dollar Shave Club founders proved that. After all, their $4,500 ad spring-boarded their journey to being a $1 billion company. It's also not an understatement to say that the right promotional product videos can work for any product - whether it's something as familiar as a razor or as niche as a gummy-bear burger from Vat19. No matter what your business is, product videos can take your business to new heights.
Your business can have videos that prospective customers watch, love, enjoy and cherish for years to come with the right film company. And, as we've seen, these videos needn't be super complex with multi-million dollar budgets. Even smaller businesses with more limited budgets can benefit dramatically from the power of video. Indeed, sometimes it's the investment in that one video that goes viral or those multiple videos that take buyers on a journey from being a prospect to a paying customer that transforms a small business into a big one.
If you're looking for promotional product videos, please contact us at ReyFilm. We'd love to learn more about your project, see how we can help make it a reality, and provide an estimate.