Engage through digital video - Nike teaches Rihanna dance moves in new video

I was presenting to the Nokia Marketing Forum, where I met up with Richard Ting the executive director at the R/GA advertising agency based in Manhattan and part of the Interpublic Group. Richard's presentation to the Nokia customer event featured several cool and innovative elements, plus had a lot of overlap with mine, around customer engagement. In addition to working with the Nokia account, Richard also works closely with the Nike account. And the best example I saw of engagement was a cool collaboration with the dance/hiphop artist Rihanna.

Rihanna is a young female singer known for her uptempo dance hits and great dancing in her videos. Nike got together with her, and shot a new video for her hit "SOS". What is unique about this video, is that being digital, it has built in links to click on any of the dancers, to isolate the dancer in the video, and then learn those moves. First, this is a wonderful application of the digital technology to enhance the viewing experience of an established and  vital element of youth culture - music videos. Secondly, it brings a logical link between the footwear - Nike - and the dance moves of a known artist, Rihanna. Third, this is taking that vital step from interruptive advertising to engagement advertising. Finally, for my taste, SOS is a good choice of song as well. Excellent job R/GA ! I'll be featuring this story in all of my Digital TV/IP TV and Mobile-TV related presentations, and am sure Alan will in his various engagement marketing workshops.

But there is an interesting follow-up twist. What Nike is now observing is that on various user-generated video sites like YouTube and SeeMeTV etc, there now are appearing user-generated dance videos where would-be dance video dancers now perform those same Rihanna video moves. Great! This proves not only was the Nike-Rihanna campaign gaining viewers, clearly some of the viewers had to have been impressed and moved by the new option, to go and then copy the moves to make their own videos. I feel this will become a new dimension to music videos. Just like so many other innovations to music video, the creative input often comes from advertising!

Comments

[Bill]

For those readers looking for an easy software tool to create, host and deliver Video Advertising, then take a look at the StreamerNet Mobile Video Producer.

The company has released the first “plug-and-play, click-and-stream” software program (WinXP) that lets you create your do-it-yourself sales commercial and upload it to your private StreamerNet video library. Simply place the provided link within web sites or AdBoxes and subsequent click-thrus will stream the video ad to the viewer.

More details at http://www.streamernet.com/html/videoad.html

This product is a swiss-army knife which enables simplified creation and management of all things video, such as video email, live streaming, media conversion, podcasting and more.