Massive YouTube Film Experiment Announced

A project that should entirely live up to the billing "historic cinematic experiment" has begun. Ridley Scott, Kevin Macdonald, YouTube, and LG have asked people all over the world to record (part of) their lives on July 24th, and then much of the footage will be used to create a single film that'll premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

This undertaking has been labeled "Life in a Day." It's meant to act as a sort of time capsule, showing what the earth was like at a specific point. The only restrictions involve not including trademarks or copyrighted content (music, TV clips, etc.), and would-be participants must also upload their footage before July 31st.



As for the men behind the project, Kevin Macdonald, who directed The Last King of Scotland, will be responsible for actually editing the footage together, and Ridley Scott, who's perhaps best known for his work on Gladiator, Blade Runner, and Thelma & Louise, is acting as executive producer.

The final product could be quite remarkable. Scott, Macdonald, YouTube, and LG have created a strong incentive for people to participate - 20 contributors will get taken to the premiere, and everyone whose footage is used will be credited as a co-director - so there should be no shortage of material.

More information is available here if any of this sounds interesting to you. Good luck to all involved.

YouTube Marketing Now Stronger with Call To Action Overlay

Call-to-action overlay is one of the most recent features that have been added to YouTube keeping in mind the marketing potential of the platform and I am sure this is going to make YouTube a much more powerful tool for marketers. This Call to Action overlay is available only for Promoted videos though.

YouTube has been offering the Promoted Videos for all its users in US for quite some time now. Promoted Videos were earlier known as Sponsored videos and are nothing but YouTube advertisement. You can basically select one of your videos, add some text to it and select the keywords for which you would like your video to get triggered. When a user searches for any of those keywords besides the organic results your result also shows up.

Promoted videos are increasingly gaining prominence in YouTube and with this new call to action overlay feature I would not be surprised if it becomes a rage among marketers. This call to action overlays allow the advertiser to drive traffic to their sites where they can make purchases, sign up for email newsletters or whichever action an advertiser wishes.

Setting up this call to action overlay for your YouTube video is pretty easy.
a) Start your promoted video campaign
b) Under My Videos go to Video Details Page
c) Fill out the easy form with the necessary details for call to action

YouTube Insights has always been a very helpful tool for YouTube marketing and with this call to action overlay coming into picture, Insights would be an indispensable tool for all marketers.

The lethal combination of the huge traffic base of YouTube, availability of Promoted Video option followed by this Call to Action Overlay feature and YouTube Insight can actually prompt a lot of marketers to consider YouTube as a main stream marketing channel.