BooneOakley hacks YouTube
There’s a lot of good things about working around The Nerdery (free crack/energy drinks, four-legged vacuum cleaners, rad people, etc.), but my new favorite perk is learning about the population that lives in
agency world ecosystem.
From my naive vantage point, agencies fit into one of two silos: those that take themselves way too seriously, or those that have a goofy amount of fun with their job and push the interactive agency space into cool places. Guess which one I like working with?
Enter: BooneOakley.
On the scene since 2000, these guys just launched a YouTube site. No, I’m not saying that like “they’re on The Facebook.” They literally launched a YouTube site, powered by YouTube, and getting ALL traffic
redirected from http://www.booneoakley.com.
Here’s the real fun. It’s functional. Fully. Functional. Leveraging embeddable annotations, you can fully navigate through different parts of the site. And you should, especially the bios with the pooping dog.
These guys get it, have fun with their work, are pushing it ahead, and hopefully will return my phone calls. If there’s one thing nerds like, it’s partnering with agencies that get it, have fun, and do innovative
work.
Dig it? Get up in their tweets, or leave them a YouTube message.
Matt Albiniak is a Sr. Account Nerd at Nerdery Interactive Labs. Learn more about him on the Periodic Table of Nerdery.
3 Responses to “BooneOakley hacks YouTube”
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breon on June 1st, 2009
While not as sexy as BooneOakley, this guy uses a similar approach.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPQ1XrllZmA
mattalbiniak on June 1st, 2009
Whoa. Nice find.
Bill Allen on June 2nd, 2009
Thanks for the article!
Patrick Boivin’s work is pretty amazing (just as sexy IMO). I blogged about some of his stop action animations a while back myself. The games never worked quite as well but they were tremendously innovative.
I think the main idea was not so much, “let’s be first” but “why not?”. Youtube, like many social spaces, offers so many advantages and access to conversation. I think it’s an obvious model that brands should, will and are following (some more successfully than others). The fact that they offered annotation made it a pretty logical jump.
Is the site a gimmick or a stunt? I dunno, it seems that if there is real benefit to an action beyond just the attention getting then it could be argued that it’s something more substantive. In this case, we have compelling media (seemingly people like it), matched with great, well established conversational tools, mixed with an easy to disseminate format and platform to support it and on top of it all … pretty easy to execute, albiet with design limitations of YouTube.
We plan to make more, we can’t let down our new subscribers.
Thanks again.
-bill aka @vilehelm