Mark and Bob Moeller of R. F. Moeller Jeweler
fully embrace all things new media. Last year the twosome set an ambitious goal
of creating a number of videos with Twin Cities’ media talent Tom Mischke. The
Moeller brothers hit on a winner right out of the blocks with “The Five Stages
of a Wedding Engagement.” In the video, Mischke plays out the five stages of a
wedding engagement that just happen to be the five stages of grief. The video
has been uploaded to YouTube several times and under different names, but Mark
Moeller stated last year that the video received nearly 9,000 unique views in
less than three weeks. The Moeller brothers are true to their word. The
retailing brothers are all over YouTube with everything from Mischke-character
videos to how-to productions for buying diamonds. But, by far “Five Stages” is
t heir funniest and most provocative video to date. See what
video industry video marketing guru Nick Failla says about the Minneapolis and
St. Paul, MN-based retailer’s online video.

This video rides a fine line between driving customers to your store and
driving them as far away from the chapel as is considered humanly
possible!  My guess is that this spot was the last bit of chiding more
than one scared little hombre needed to decide he better hop the “What the heck
was I thinking!” bus and head off to join the likes of Sasquatch, the Loch Ness
Monster and the Abominable Snow Man.

It’s a funny video and most guys will laugh at it
and I imagine more than a few gals will too.  I wonder however, if it hits
too close to home with divorce rates at 50%.  Maybe they could have
adjusted the stages to reflect coming to terms with getting married in a more
positive but still very funny manner.  You have to wonder how many couples
got in an argument shortly after watching this video!

Another consideration after making appropriate
adjustments might be to make this a five part series for a television
campaign.  Instead of making the viewer wait 5-12 months to see the entire
series and thus the “punch line”, you could use a teaser that drives potential
customers to your website to see the other episodes.  You could do this
regardless of which episode you were airing at the time.  In the interest
of growing your email database you might even make it so they had to enter
their e-mail address to view the videos.

Overall this video was funny, creative and quite
savvy as it takes advantage of the marketplaces attachment to Mischke, a local
celebrity and on air personality that stars in a series of very humorous R.F.
Moeller videos.

Nick Failla

JCK