This month in our roundup of the best content marketing: Iron Maiden enters the world of Angry Birds, Etihad makes a pilot out of a six-year-old, and Jeff Koons makes some virtual installations.
Delta Measures Your Bathroom
How high should you mount your showerhead? How much space should be around your toilet? What kind of clearance does your bathtub need? This is all valuable information that isn’t so easy to come by, so Delta published this highly useful blog post on the subject. Sure, it isn’t as exciting as some of the content marketing we write about, but it’s very good for those two aforementioned reasons: it’s useful and it’s hard to come by.
Etihad Airways Makes a 6-Year-Old a Pilot
In September, a six-year-old kid named Adam impressed a pilot from Etihad Airways with his knowledge of aviation. The pilot got a video, which promptly went viral. Naturally, Etihad responded by inviting Adam to Etihad’s training academy to try him out in a simulator, give him some sweet airline swag, and shoot this very cute viral hit.
Iron Maiden Joins Angry Birds
Video games can age quickly, so special events and new content can help keep them relevant. Case in point: Angry Birds put together a two-week long Halloween event for their game, and to drum up some attention they partnered with legendary heavy metal band Iron Maiden to create a bird version of Maiden’s mascot Eddie. Eddie the Bird was a recruit-able character for the two-week event, and he went through four “evolutions” to represent different Iron Maiden albums.
Assassin’s Creed Explores Ancient Egypt
Speaking of video game marketing, it’s pretty common to post a few video play-throughs on YouTube in the run up to a new game. But Ubisoft wanted to do better for Assassin’s Creed: Origins, so they launched the site Explore Ancient Egypt to better present their content marketing and collect user information. Aside from watching one of three video tours of the game’s open world, they also offered the chance to share key moments from the videos to social media in exchange for the chance to win a contest. Even more content was available to people who signed up for the website.
Snapchat Teams Up With Jeff Koons
Just when you thought that Jeff Koons had achieved peak pop-art, the man behind the near-ubiquitous Balloon Dog has become even pop-ier (and Balloon Dog even closer to ubiquity) by creating the world’s first “virtual art instillation” with the help of Snapchat. Basically, when you go to one of nine locations around the world (Toronto’s Roundhouse Park is one of them), you can use Snapchat to view a Jeff Koons virtual installation. The instillations will only be around for a couple of weeks though; then, they move on. Virtual content is a major area of exploration for Snapchat, but one of the problems it can run into is oversaturation. That’s why you can’t see the Koons installations just anywhere, and that’s why they’re moving after a few weeks. For those of us working in the digital space, it’s food for thought.
Are You Born to Engineer?
Born to Engineer is an organisation that promotes engineering as a career, offering classroom toolkits to teachers, listing opportunities, and producing videos designed to share engineering stories. Case in point: this short film about Ben Ryan, a man whose son had to have his arm amputated as an infant. Ryan studied engineering, invented a new kind of 3D printed hydraulic prosthetic, and now has a company that provides affordable custom prosthetics to kids worldwide. This example of short, empathetic, and sharable content marketing makes the case for engineering far more effectively than any career fair.