BOONEOAKLEY | BOONEOAKLEY WEBSITE | 2010
The Company Website That Was Built Entirely Inside YouTube / BOONEOAKLEY "WEBSITE"
There's an agency that built its company website without a single page of its own. BooneOakley put together its entire site using nothing but YouTube videos.
The problem
BooneOakley, an independent agency in Charlotte, USA, needed a new company website. But they were busy with client work and didn't want to spend much time or money on it.
The insight
Nobody actually reads a normal "About Us" page. So why not turn it into a story instead, told with narration and cheap-looking animation? And then they realized something: YouTube's "annotation" feature lets you embed clickable links right inside a video. That could work as the site's entire navigation. That realization is the heart of this idea.
The idea
Go to the site's URL and you're instantly dropped into a YouTube video. It tells the story of a marketing guy named Billy, who gets swallowed up by a big agency's holding company, gets fired after he's forced to write bad copy, and ends up killed by his wife. Everything else—the agency's work, its partners—is shown the same way, with viewers clicking embedded links inside each video to jump to the next one.
What happened
The site got 500,000 hits within a few weeks of launch, and passed 1 million views within three months. Blogs around the world wrote about it, and new business inquiries came in from companies including EA Games, Microsoft, and GoDaddy. It won Gold at the 2010 Cannes Lions and a Gold Pencil at the One Show Interactive.
Afterthought
They made a website by not making a website. The sheer boldness of flipping the idea on its head is basically the whole reason this won awards. It's a simple thing really—doing something genuinely different to prove you're different—but the nerve it takes to actually pull it off is what gets me.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2010
