This month in content marketing, there’s a pool full of Jell-O, more than you ever wanted to know about coffee, and a whole lot of dancing Pikachu.
The last time we featured content from NordVPN, they were sponsoring a video about breaking a smart lock. That was smart, on-brand content marketing. But NordVPN has expanded their horizons, which is why they’ve sponsored Mark Rober’s super interesting engineering challenge: how to get a pool full of Jell-O. It’s tougher than you’d think, but the idea is worth nearly eighteen million views (at the time of this writing).
The main bread and butter of Binging With Babish is creator Andrew Rea’s recreations of food from movies and TV. However, he has a second series called Basics With Babish, and it affords him two things. One, he shows viewers how to cook basic stuff like pasta, chicken, bread, etc. Two, he has a little more room to partner with sponsors, such as Trade, a coffee subscription service. It’s smart that he does a second series like this, as subscribers who are less comfortable with content marketing can stick with the original series and those who are fine with a little marketing in their YouTube get more content.
Well, he posted a YouTube video titled “Detective Pikachu: Full Picture”, which ended up just being Pikachu dancing for an hour and forty-two minutes. Reynolds is a master of content marketing, as seen in his many Deadpool stunts. His internet literacy helps a lot here (the dancing Pikachu is pretty reminiscent of the 1988 Crystal Light National Aerobic Championship Opening, a video loved by the internet and parodied by everyone from Key and Peele to Team Fortress 2), but Reynolds most valuable asset is he understands when people think it’s fun to be tricked. Speaking of which . . .
Outdoor clothing company North Face faced derision and ridicule this week when they launched a campaign to insert their brand into Wikipedia. By taking images of models wearing North Face at popular tourist destinations and putting those images into Wikipedia, ad agency Leo Burnett Taylor Made hoped to improve North Face’s Google ranking. Coverage of the stunt has been fairly negative though, and they’re being accused of “vandalizing” Wikipedia.