To all marketing professionals - "Get creative or find new work"

One of the areas of business affected most profoundly by Web2.0 and new technologies is the world of marketing.  No longer is just a catchy message delivered by an actor during the commercial break sufficient to woo customers.  Advertising today must be creative, cool and most of all, entertaining.  The old "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV" approach, guilting your audience into a purchase, may do more harm for a companies image as the result of negative customer backlash than good in today's environment.  Marketers have been embracing MySpace and YouTube for a a year or so, but recently advertisements in the form of entertaining videos with every-so subtle messages from their sponsor have achieved phenomenal success at reaching their audience.  Stride Gum launched what is perhaps the most successful of these new-form campaigns recently with their video Where the Hell is Matt?  As you can see from the video below, this is first and foremost an entertaining video.  Second, its a short and subtle spot for Stride Gum, but only after the viewer has been fully drawn in by the video do we realize this.

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This video has received over four million views on YouTube....a huge viewership for any marketing campaign, particularly one as low budget as this, granted Stride probably has $10,000 invested in airfare alone.  In true Web2.0 fashion, we launched a response with Where in Israel is Jacob? (yes, mixing in a Zionist subtext to keep things interesting).  This video has 6,000 views in the first week, which we're also excited about.