Mercedez-Benz had five seconds.

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Abhra

This is June 2012. These days when you want to watch a video on YouTube, there are ads which start that you can only skip after 5 seconds. I hate these ads because they eat into my meager bandwidth. I watched one of them to the end, the new Mercedez-Benz ad. Why did I do that?

Mercedez-Benz had five seconds to do something that the user wouldn’t skip. What did they do?

They started with a nice music video-ish clip of a scene moving past the screen, and some nice music in the background. You see what happened there? For a moment you wouldn’t know this is an ad. I didn’t hit skip. I waited. Then I was sucked into the ad, which is what they wanted. I didn’t like the whole ad so much, but that’s irrelevant; they got me to watch it.

I don’t know if this was intentional. Probably not, because they didn’t do this ad just for YouTube. They did it for TV, everywhere. But it worked here.

Here’s the video:

Germany Through My Lens

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Abhra

At the DAAD¹ Young Ambassador² annual meet in Delhi, India, we had a special session for presenting our photos and videos from around Germany. The night before, I decided I’d do something slightly better than just opening up the photos and tapping the right arrow key as the room stares at the projector screen out of nicety. So I stayed up all night making a video out of photos and clips, and threw in some of my favourite uncommon music. As dawn was breaking, I went to the front desk of our hotel and asked if the swimming pool was open yet. It was plain from my looks that I hadn’t slept. The guy must have thought I was crazy. He said it opens from eight. So I went back and hit the bed. And got up an hour later for our program that day.

Anyway, everyone liked the video. At the end, it was replayed as a way of finishing the meet, so that was great. Ms. Christiane Schlottmann, head of DAAD India, said the music was cool. I had uploaded it to YouTube and today DAAD India uploaded it to their newly opened YouTube channel. So here it is from their channel, and I hope you like it!