This month in content marketing, the Flex Tape meme machine kicked into gear again, Tom Cruise gave the world surprisingly technical TV advice, and Terry Crews tapped into his inner Bob Ross.
Okay, here it is in a nutshell: Flex Tape is a very strong tape originally promoted in one of those bombastic TV infomercials. See here. Then a super popular YouTuber named JonTron made a pretty funny video of him reacting to the Flex Tape ad and doing funny things with Flex Tape. See here. Millions of views later, Flex Tape had become a meme and the owners were no doubt super happy about it. So happy that they handed JonTron a sack full of cash for him to create another Flex Tape video, seen below. Lesson: when you become a meme, just go with it and maybe hand out sacks of cash.
Google Science Fair Awards Show is hosted by Kari Byron, of Mythbusters, and Simon Giertz, the Queen of Shitty Robots. So the two got together and made fake brains, which they then blew up. Consider the 13-18 year olds in your life duly informed about Google Science Fair.
Motion smoothing sucks. It’s this thing where your TV ads false frames to stuff you’re watching to, well, remove blur. It’s great when you’re watching sports. But it’s less great when you’re watching a movie, since it makes your movie look like a soap opera. So Tom Cruise shot this little PSA about how to turn off motion smoothing and put it on Twitter.
I’m taking a quick break from filming to tell you the best way to watch Mission: Impossible Fallout (or any movie you love) at home. pic.twitter.com/oW2eTm1IUA
— Tom Cruise (@TomCruise) December 4, 2018
It brought a lot of attention to his new movie, Mission Impossible: Fallout, and according to Google Trends a lot of people actually started to look up motion smoothing.
Pornhub would love to advertise like a normal business, but they can’t. Because they sell porn. So, they go the content marketing route. Specifically, they put together really informative data posts like this, the Pornhub 2018 Year in Review. Did you know that 2018 was defined by searches like Stormy Daniels, Fortnite, and 4k? Anyway, sites like Buzzfeed,Men’s Health, and TechCrunch turn this stuff into content, leading to thousands of people reading about Pornhub’s corner of the internet, which is better than an ad any day of the week.
Terry Crews is a man of many talents who also hosts America’s Got Talent: The Champions. So here he is doing a Bob Ross style painting. This just goes to show that there’s an appetite out there for longer video content and not everything needs to be, and we hate using this word, snackable. Ugh.
Remember that time Nick Offerman sat in front of a fire and drank whisky for 45 minutes? Well, Lagavulin thought they could top that, so they had Nick Offerman be a living statue and take a sip of whisky. A very, very slow sip of whisky.
This is an ad, but it’s fun, so enjoy.