“Don't say the old lady screamed—bring her on and let her scream.” In his advice on storytelling, Mark Twain’s timeless wit and wisdom holds true in the discussion of online video. Thanks to advances in Internet technology and increased bandwidth over the last few years, online video has emerged as the fastest growing media platform with an estimated 72% of Web users watching online video clips. In the next three years, Web video consumption is projected to double. The message to marketers? Visitors expect a rich experience when they come to your site. As one of the most powerful tools in the marketer’s arsenal, online video offers a wealth of opportunity for rich storytelling, differentiation, brand building and traffic-generation.

The resurgence of video in storytelling
In the 90’s, corporate capabilities videos were commonplace, but distribution was limited to VHS and DVD.
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Being connected to customer needs and desires should be a key aspect of shaping your B2B brand. But the engine of growth needs to include creativity, something many B2B executives don't spend much time on. Others like Google stake their reputation on creativity. They walk the talk: All engineers are allotted up to 20 percent of their time to work on their own ideas. The result? Products like Gmail and Google News, seeds of which began as personal endeavors.

According to MIT Media Lab, a hotbed of creativity, the secret sauce for business creativity is developing an environment where different people from different areas and disciplines of an enterprise, work together to share ideas to innovate.

Dr.
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When getting to know other design professionals, I often like to ask a version of "So, what do you do?" Since we all know — in the broad sense — what each other does, I tend to skew the question more toward the "how". "Tell me about your design style," is an invitation to discuss one's work, creative philosophy and tastes. Overwhelmingly, I hear people use the terms "simple" and "clean" to describe their ideal layouts.

Simple, clean designs are often the most clear way to communicate a given idea. A place for everything, everything in its place, with an effective rhythm and hierarchy to the elements on the page can really make a message sing. On its own, this fact is enough to make any communicator set "Simple" as their goal. Another reason is that, in our modern marketplace, with its cacophony of garish printed and electronic messages vying with our own thoughts for our valuable attention, a well-organized, well-planned, simple page becomes a visual
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Keep tabs on your competition’s creative with this easy checklist

Quickly: Describe five of your competitor’s advertising campaigns and how they differentiate themselves in your industry. How do their advertising efforts match up to yours? If you’re spending more than a couple minutes thinking about this, then you’re not alone.

Given the fast-paced environments we work in, it’s all too easy to focus on short-term, easier to accomplish tasks, which prevents you from achieving larger objectives. Long-term goals, such as overcoming a host of competitors in order to position your company as an industry leader, require an ongoing cycle of industry observation, self-evaluation and refinement of your marketing materials. While this may seem common sense, too often we become so concentrated on our own marketing efforts that it’s easy to skip the most crucial aspect of this process—observation of the
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If creativity is the pursuit of ideas, then strategic creativity is predatory. It's the hunt for a powerful solution that can drive your whole marketing program. But strategic creative doesn't exist in any of the usual places. And it can't be recycled from last year's campaign. It's new thinking. It's fresh, grown from a single thought.

Most creative ideas are like newborn crocodiles. They are precocious at first but only 2% of them live long enough to grow big teeth. That's because truly original ideas sound strange at first. They are usually squashed as soon as they hatch. If no one has rolled their eyes at you lately then you've probably been keeping your creative ideas to yourself. 

New thinking is critical but it isn't enough. Strategic creative must be aligned with your brand positioning. It should embody your brand.

Pre-qualify early ideas by asking yourself three questions:

1. Is it unique?

2. Is it memorable?

3.
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You can’t go anywhere or strike up a conversation with anyone without the topic turning to the economy. Invariably the question I ask or is asked of me is, “How’s business?”

We’ve been through this before and weathered the storm. So have our clients. Typically, the knee-jerk reaction is to cut budgets, reallocate funds and tighten the marketing and advertising belt. We have a white paper titled, “Why Branding Becomes More Important In Uncertain Times” written by Ken Jones. You can download this white paper here.

Marketers who decide to continue to invest in their marketing programs during tough economic times, albeit possibly at a smaller allocation, need to be more prudent how and where they spend their money. That’s obvious.

So how is business? You’ve still got a communications budget, probably smaller than originally planned.
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