This month, BBC Travel was all about Dubai, Stella Artois made a good point about drinking water, and the internet got obsessed with an Airsoft video. Oh, and some guy launched a car into space. What’s that about?
Travel writing has always had a nebulous relationship with brands and tourism boards (for more on that, check here), so the travel industry in Dubai decided to pay for the space on BBC Travel and put up their own content. Basically, they’ve decided to profile different sorts of people who travel or live in Dubai, from a recording artist to a chef to a “mompreneur”. Each person profiled has a short video about them, followed by an article, under which they’ve linked related Dubai travel stories and possible itineraries. Each bit of content is brief, but it always flows to yet more content, should you want it.
YouTube pranks are a mostly terrible genre, but that just means there’s room for brands like Stella Artois to pull halfway decent pranks in the name of charity and activism. Here, they’re making the point that lots of people around the world don’t have easy access to water, and they make this point by having waiters tell customers that it’ll be a six hour wait for water. Cue indignation, then Matt Damon shows up for a big reveal. It’s actually pretty clever—the pranksters contrast their target’s indignation with the message they’re delivering, but none of the targets feel truly bad about their indignation because we should be outraged about other people waiting for water. Solid prank, Stella.
We admit, Airsoft is a niche activity. But it has a pretty avid base of fans and they’re into this video where a German police officer (who’s a member of their equivalent to SWAT) takes on a bunch of Airsoft and ruins them. This guy is seriously good at what he does and it’s interesting to watch from a POV position. At least 10 million YouTubers think so, anyway.
You’ve already heard this story, but what kind of content marketing roundup would this be if it didn’t acknowledge the biggest content marketing play of the year? Yep, SpaceX launched Elon Musk’s very own Tesla Roadster into space on their Falcon Heavy rocket and then every media organisation in the world wrote about it. Musk produced content on YouTube, Instagram, and more, then he proceeded to earn all the media in the world.