John Raymond » Viral Video Campaigns

2007 Playhouse Square Broadway Series Viral Video Contest0

John Raymond — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:53:00 +0000

This is another commercial that I wrote and directed for Playhouse Square. It was to help promote their 2007 Broadway Series website. More details on the contest to come.

Mr. Clean Magic Eraser Video Contest Submission

John Raymond — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:46:49 +0000

Mr. Clean promoted their Magic Eraser with a contest back in 2007. They challenged you to create a commercial to help promote their product. I wrote the commercial and had friends act and film it. I didn’t win the grand prize but sure got a lot of enjoyment out of the piece I produced.

Speak Up Classes At Playhouse Square

John Raymond — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:41:06 +0000

The Education Department at Playhouse Square asked me to come up and produce a commercial to promote their lunch-time “Speak Up Classes.” These classes help working professionals with public speaking. They wanted something outside the box and funny. So we shot this in the winter of 2007.

Playhouse Square Spamalot Viral Video Contest

John Raymond — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:30:15 +0000

In the fall of 2006, I was charged with coming up with some kind of interactive contest to target a “younger audience.” The typical target audience for Playhouse Square is women age 60-65. We felt that Spamalot was a great show to test out this sort of contest.

After doing some research, I came up with a Viral Video Contest. This was a relatively new thing at the time. I carefully studied some of the successful campaigns and broke down the elements that got the campaign off the ground. With no budget, I had to get creative and wrote and starred in an edgy viral video to help promote the contest.

We launched a mini-site (which I designed and constructed) along with the video. The video got over 1000 views in the first four days of launch. We utilized html email blasts, myspace and facebook to help promote the contest.

The contest lasted a month and got 5 submissions. Here’s an archive page that contains some of the submissions from the contest: http://www.playhousesquare.us/spamvideocontest/.

Playhouse Square’s upper management saw the potential in the work we had done with no budget. The non-profit organization committed over $5,000 for a high end digital video camera and an internship to help us continue to do more of these types of videos.