video marketing

6 Things You Can Learn from an Unfunny Marketer’s Funny Redemption

Fifteen years ago, my friend Doug Kessler swore off any attempt at “comedy” after an attempt at funny dissolved into flat-out failure. Doug, who runs marketing agency Velocity UK in London, recalls the white-hot shame of it all: “We wrote a script. Sent it to client. We expected some review and back and forth… but when they said ‘Great! Let’s shoot it!’… we did. “It was SO not funny and SO stupid that I’m still blushing 15 years later.” But, more recently, Doug started to rethink things. Because what’s working in B2B marketing is (quite often) the offbeat story and the funny vignette. In October, at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, speaker Tim Washer talked about the powerful pairing of B2B and improv, and Doug realized that “it was crazy to close off such a fruitful direction just because I’d failed once.” So here’s the Velocity shot at redemption, created for […]

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The Airbnb Berlin Wall Anniversary Film: A Q&A with Its Creator

Airbnb yesterday launched a short animated film aligned with two things: the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a traveler-inspired story of “belonging anywhere.” “Wall and Chain” tells the story of a woman named Cathrine who in 2012 brought her father back to Berlin for the first time since he’d left decades prior, before the fall of the Wall. Cathrine’s father, Jörg, had been a guard in West Germany. In Berlin, through Airbnb, Cathrine and her father booked a place with a friend of Kai, once a guard on the opposite side of the wall, in East Germany. See the result in this short but powerful film: Wow, right? So how did Airbnb hear Cathrine’s story? Why did it select this story? How much did this cost, anyway? And what are the broader lessons content marketers take from belonganywhere? I asked Dennis Goedegebuure, who led the

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