When it comes to telling a great story through video, SnugZ/USA (asi/88060) is the Steven Spielberg of the promotional products industry.

Indeed, few in the ad specialty space create marketing videos with the entertainment value, narrative ingenuity and high-gloss production quality of the West Jordan, UT-based supplier. SnugZ’s efforts earned the company gold in Counselor’s Best Marketing Video contest in 2016 – a feat now repeated in 2017 on the strength of several videos Counselor is collectively honoring for their humor, creative flair and return-on-investment.

First up is “Germ Warfare.” The video promotes hand sanitizer that SnugZ offers, but plays more like an endearingly quirky skit than a product pitch. The video features two characters dressed up with cartoon colorfulness as “bad nasties” – common germs that cause illness. A woman in the video comes into contact with the “bad nasties” at a water fountain, but then uses hand sanitizer SnugZ offers to eradicate them. The video includes jazzy background music and a female voiceover with a proper English accent that relates a couple key points about disease-spreading and how hand sanitizer can nip germs in the bud. Pushed out through social media channels and the SnugZ blog and newsletter, the video has helped drive sales and keep the supplier at the forefront of customers’ minds. As of press time, the video had 2,441 views.

That stat count was, however, far surpassed by SnugZ’s “SwagWow!” campaign – a set of three videos that garnered 11,558 views, 487 reactions, 49 shares and 75 comments. The videos feature actor Lucas Kappler, who portrays a laughter-inducing character that is based on famous infomercial pitchman Vince Offer of the “ShamWow!” commercials. The videos helped build buzz around new products that ranged from a bottle with a carabiner to a lens cleaner, microfiber cloth and dual-use lanyard. Kappler’s character “Paully the SwagWow Man” hypes the products in pitchman fashion – all at once satirizing and leveraging the infomercial hard-sell tactic.

“Instead of fighting the hard-sell approach, we embraced it,” says Brandon Brown, marketing director at SnugZ. “We began the creative process by watching more infomercials in three hours than a healthy human should consume in a lifetime.”

For SnugZ, the investment in entertaining, narrative-driven marketing videos is a smart business strategy the company believes will stand it in good stead in the new era of marketing. “Intrusive, interruptive, self-centered marketing no longer works the way it once did, and its effectiveness will only continue to diminish,” says Brown. “What will replace the legacy model? There’s a one-word answer: stories. Good content marketing moves the brand needle, increasing awareness, changing perception, and creating desire and drive to purchase.”