Marketing Videos At The Masters

Anyone who watched the Masters this past weekend got to see some great golf interspersed with the same commercials… over and over again. It’s a Masters thing. There are fewer commercial breaks, but the same ads are shown throughout the broadcast.

Kind of annoying, but believe it or not one of them actually got my attention and drove me to act. IBM promoted a series of “films” the company is showing at its website, so I checked them out.

Wow. I was expecting a few short web videos. Not the case. One of the two that are currently posted is 30-minutes long. The other is 13-minutes. Both document IBM achievements over the years.

It’s a pretty bold video strategy. The company clearly invested a lot in the productions, and I enjoyed them.  They certainly do a good job of driving home the message about what an important company IBM has been in the computing world.

The only problem, I’m not sure how many people will take the time to watch. I know I did, but hey, I’m in the video marketing biz.

I think there’s a huge audience out there for videos that are 5-minutes or less. 30-minutes… not so much. Heck, I usually recommend companies produce marketing videos that are 2-minutes or less.

IBM’s 30-minute film is actually broken into shorter segments, and I’m wondering why they simply didn’t release the individual segments instead of creating one big video? Stagger their release every couple days and now you have a series people could better manage.

–Tony Gnau