You may have already seen this video. I implore you to watch it right now if you have not.
It is one of two vidoes IBM produced to celebrate 100 years in business.
I took two major things away from it.
First, IBM is involved in everything. Traffic light infrastructure, online hotel and plane reservesation software, barcodes, computers, and just this week they had a computer play (and win) Jeapordy! The remarkable thing about all of this is most of these huge successes came from huge swings. They hegged the entire company on the idea that computers would take off a consumer technology. Common sense now, tremendously innovative and scary then. Just this video made me want to invenst in IBM because I was so impressed by everything the company does.
Second, and more relevant to the blog, really compelling content makes for a good ad- regardless of length. These vidoes are ads and total 45 minutes in length. Sitting through them was a joy, not a buredon. It was all about IBM and the content is really brilliant. There's popular rethoric that people don't watch vidoes over 3 minutes but over half a million people have watched these vidoes from IBM.
Once again IBM took a huge swing, and ends up with something brilliant.
you can also watch the second one here.