The Monroe Bro: By Interns, for YouTube

As part of our newly launched social media campaign, highlighting Monroe’s evolving brand, we recently published a YouTube video. Our goal: show people our calculators as an alternative strategy of driving traffic towards our website.

Our intern team, Scott, Devyn, and Andrei, spent the better part of a week writing, shooting, and editing the project, using their millennial insight to utilize social media as an alternative marketing platform. Being a smaller company with limited advertising options, this project was inspired by the success of other memorable YouTube videos doubling as advertisements.

Part of the value of a Super Bowl commercial is the massive audience. The other value comes from the millions of views that the ad will generate on YouTube in the coming days. Free to post, and relatively cheap to produce, the only challenge in producing a YouTube based ad is creating something people want to watch.

In order for a video to go viral, it must generate an interest factor.

Damn Daniel created intrigue, Charlie Bit My Finger made people laugh, and Gangnam Style undeniably possessed an “it factor.” Many companies attempt to generate similar traffic by creating advertisements with similar characteristics. However, people don’t want to watch advertisements.

In order to combat the tendency to exit out of any video attempting to sell something, that video needs to posses an exceptional entertainment value, which the interns set out to do.

Given their limited resources, the interns adopted a minimalist strategy in their production of this project. Rather than rely on special effects, exciting background action, or wild stunts, the entertainment value of this video came from the content of the writing and calculator itself.

And by doing so, the interns brought to life a classic office essential: the commercial calculator. Keeping in line with the company’s history, the interns edited the footage to black and white. However, they centered it around the Monroe UltimateX calculator known as the Monroe Bro, a play on narcissistic, heavy-weight-lifting, beach-going, beer-pong-loving guys, giving it a tasteful dose of college humor.

In a way it illustrates Monroe’s history, this video highlights how the company is adapting to the future. We realize that products such as the commercial calculator technology don’t offer the sex appeal of the iPhone, but provide a benefit of security and privacy, crucial to industries like financial services and accounting.

And as always, we will continue to seek out new ways to strengthen our social media presence and continue to put our services at the world’s fingertips.