BooneOakley, a North-Carolina based agency, has gotten a lot of attention in the last few days by essentially shifting its corporate site to YouTube. Click on Booneoakley.com and you get to a "this is our agency" video on YouTube, complete with story of a struggling marketing director going down in flames (actually, a bloody ax) because he chose some other boring conglomerate firm instead of the oh-so-creative BooneOakley.
Embedded links in the main video connect viewers to additional company information, including a cute video thanking the Obama family for naming its new dog Bo after the company's initials.
The main video has received more than 220,000 views in its first 10 days, quite impressive for a small local firm.
It's not the first agency effort to throw out the traditional web page in favor of a more social look. Modernista! made a splash a few months back by directing visitors to its entries and feeds on various social media sites, including Wikepedia, Facebook, Delicious, and NetVibes. And any number of small firms use their blog as their main site.
The point here is not to surrender your traditional Website--although that may well be worth considering. It is rather to take more seriously the new possibilities of social media, to think differently about what matters, and to get past the inertia of last year's plan and the types of activities you've "always" done.
BtoB came out with a new marketing survey on the 2010 outlook yesterday. It was nice to see that a majority of B2B marketers expect to increase their budgets next year, but the more stunning finding to me was that majorities of marketers expect to "stay the same" in many budget categories, including print, broadcast, television, radio, telemarketing, and outdoor. Just a shade under 50 percent of the almost 500 respondents also expect to keep spending on events and direct mail the same. Surely the world has changed more than that!
What do you think?
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