Marketing Opera Max, snapshot

I wanted to share / link what i have been doing at work (or more like the team has been doing) to solve a hard high technology marketing problem.  I think it is interesting to look at our approach for solving this, and since this is all out in the open anyway, pulling it together into a single post seemed like a good way to organize my thoughts on the effort.

Quick recap:
Opera Max is my latest product, its an android app that gives you mobile data savings. So it will stretch your data plan up to 2X. Its currently live in North America, EU, Russia/CIS. More countries coming soon.

Here is the official product page on Opera.com :
http://www.opera.com/mobile/max

You can download it from Google Play here, enjoy :
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opera.max

The high technology marketing challenge :
The concept of mobile data savings, through advanced compression technology in the cloud is an idea that is not widely known in the mainstream. 

The idea that data can be compressed , especially in the mobile data sense, is not something most people have encountered on smartphones . 

Yes they may have heard of it on feature phones through Opera Mini, or they may remember zipping files to fit them on a floppy disk back in the 1990's. But on a smartphone that is not an idea people are familiar with. 

Below are the 3 marketing videos that we made for rolling out Opera Max beta to the first 40 countries and tell the story of the product.

The narrative/ story:

1.  Genesis: Why we made it , in an interview style (with yours truly)

2.  Advert with a hipster : Informational-yet-hip explanation of why people would use Opera Max

3.  100% Product shot video. Fly through the app, with a voice over

Some notes of a few other things we did:

1. We added subtitles into the videos

2. We localized / translated the Genesis interview video and the 

Here are the 2 Russian variants of the above videos :


These videos were done by a talented creative agency out of new york:

http://www.1985artists.com/
and
http://fatkingfilms.com/

All in all it has been a very interesting, creative, and fun experience to work on these videos. From collaborating on scripts, to shooting the interview it has helped us refine the message and story of Opera Max. It has helped us translate the product, and come up with a localized version of the tagline.

The results to date:
So far all the videos together have exceeded 100,000 views on youtube.com .
In total all Youtube videos about Opera Max that i have seen , including videos we made and including video reviews from other blogs, have exceeded 200,000 views.

Not a bad start IMHO, considering that we are in beta and this is just the opening act. It is interesting to consider that HBO is currently airing a show called "Silicon Valley". The show is about a garage start up called Pied Piper, which has a data compression technology. They are building a compression cloud ... lots of overlap with what we are actually doing at Opera.

So maybe this will help prime mainstream audiences for the idea that they can get an app that will save them data / improve their experience by leveraging a compression cloud :)