Yesterday I revealed the Best Web Videos: launching a new website, pushing a brand (sales up 500%!), best commercial, and best worst commercial (jingle stays in your head forever). All of these were produced by pro’s who were hired specifically to raise awareness of the product and drive more sales. But not everything that the pro’s do has to be about improving sales… sometimes it’s just for fun! And that’s what the first two winners (and one honorable mention) in today’s Best Of 2007 list have in common. I then finish with my pick for the overall Best Web Video Advertising Campaign (all Adobe Flash Video based) of 2007. It’s a doosey!

(Warning: Some videos have adult themes and language.)

Best Conference Video

Photoshop for the iPhone video: Each year there are thousands of conferences that are put on around the world and, more and more, video is becoming a key component of each one. So much so, that there are entire video production companies who do nothing but support the Audio-Visual (AV) needs of these conferences. A major component of these AV requirements has become the production of a “fun” video just for the viewing pleasure of conference attendees. Besides just being fun, these videos work as an indirect way of marketing the conference after the fact by people saying “you should have been there to see this hilarious video of…” and so on. The best conference videos make it out of the conference in viral video form and get a life of their own on the web. Such was the case with the iPod Flea commercial from the 2005 MacDesign conference that made it to the New York Times website.

So at the Adobe Keynote at PhotoshopWorld Las Vegas this year, we ran a spoof of the Apple iPhone demos. Specifically, we made a joke of the premise “What if Photoshop came out as an app for the iPhone?” Now, while I’ll admit that there may be a little conflict of interest here, I need to clarify that even though I’m the Director of the Keynote, I had absolutely NOTHING to do with the development of this brilliant spoof (which is probably why it came out so well!) All of the credit goes to Jason Scrivner and Scott Kelby (and a lot of other NAPP staff who gave their input along the way). All I had to do was just call the video cue at the right moment and then sit back and laugh with the other 3,000 people that were in attendance that morning.

HONORABLE MENTION: My REMIX video of “Where’s Scott Kelby’s 3D Head At?” which you can see in its entirety (and read the full story) by clicking here!

Best 5 Seconds Ever

Another clip that was a viral sensation this year, even though it wasn’t pushing any product or brand, was that of the Dramatic Chipmunk (even though it’s actually a Prairie Dog). It’s a clip that was designed just to be fun, but it also shows the power that a good Audio Engineer/Designer can add to a video segment to make it the perfect clip. I’ve seen it 50 times and it still puts a smile on my face!

Earlier this year I wrote a longer article about this clip and how good audio doesn’t just add to a video clip, but that it has the power to completely TRANSFORM it. I also posted a series of additional “remixes” of the clip that inspired a whole new generation of audio editors to tweak various web clips. But the original is still the best, which is what I give you here.

Best Web Video Advertising Campaign

And now we get to what amounts to being the Best in Show award. While the Blendtec campaign that I profiled yesterday was impressive (and won my Best Video Pushing a Brand award) to me the clear winner this year of the Overall Best Web Video Advertising Campaign has to go to the Philips Norelco BodyGroom campaign and their highly interactive Shave Everywhere website. This is a campaign that could only exist on the web (not in traditional media) and is squarely targeted at men, with a lot of Flash video clips written for a man’s sense of humor. So much so, that once the campaign got popular and had a wider distribution than its originally intended audience, they actually now make you click on the “Body” link to see the original campaign (instead of just popping up the way it used to).

So if you’re interested in seeing the whole quirky campaign that does its best to sell a product of a sensitive nature… then I highly recommend you go to the website to see all of the clips and how well they work to both engage and inform the viewer. But since I can’t reproduce the whole website here, I’ll just give you one of the more than a dozen video clips available on the site. It’s the Story of Sack…

That’s it for my Best 7 of ‘07. Here’s looking for even better video in ‘08!

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