During the week as it was a nice day and I was in Manchester City Centre, I found myself along with various other workers and shoppers at lunch time parked in front of the ‘BBC Big Screen’ in Exchange Square.
This screen seems to mainly show a mixture of BBC News output and rolling promos for the London 2012 Olympics (of which you’ll be able to watch on said screen, perhaps even with more interested viewers than those in my picture a taken a couple of years ago when they screened the World Cup on the screen.)
In between the “look how good the Olympic Games will be” propaganda there was a very clever short promo for the BBC Radio 2 ‘2 Day’ event next week. The basic premise being pieces to camera of different Radio 2 presenters, with the sound track over dubbed with the voices of someone different.
Sat just along the way from me was a couple of guys, looking like your average middle aged office workers, obviously on their lunch break. When this promo video had finished I overheard one of them saying to the other “did you see that” and they went on to discuss the video and some of the presenters in question.
What is notable on this is that they were not talking about the games or news ticker scrolling along bottom of the screen, obviously the 2 Day promo video “did it’s job” of standing out and getting “talkability” amongst the general public.
I’ve seen this same promo on TV since and as I was thinking of writing this blog post I did wonder if I’d find the video on YouTube in order to link to it, so kudus to the BBC as when I visited the Radio 2 site I was not only given the option of viewing the video, but to “embed into your website or blog” – so I’ve done just that below, so this same talkability can be extended across social media.
So while non-BBC stations might not have the same ease of cross-trailing their promos – I’d suggest following the BBC lead of making their video embeddable on-line, YouTube is accessible to everyone if you don’t have the on-line infrastructure of the beeb.
