A little more than a year ago I wrote one of my most-visited posts about the power of engaging product demonstrations. If you haven’t read it, take a look. The purpose of this post is to revisit demonstrations with two killer examples that I saw just yesterday morning.

First, there’s the video above of the new Dyson Air Multiplier fan, above. The next chapter in Dyson’s re-think of age-old contraptions, this time we see a playful series of balloons sent through Dyson fans. The result is clever and interesting, and perfectly highlights the reason for shelling out a few hundred dollars for a new fan: It’s simply gorgeous. This two-minute film has been viewed by more than 725,000 people since late May.

The lesson here is that new products can be incredibly interesting. We like seeing what’s new, and continue to spend money on innovative items that can make our lives better. It’s the same reason that people spend billions of dollars a year on products sold in TV infomercials; in fact, I recall TiVo reporting that some of the least-skipped ads are two-minute infomercials.

The second example was forwarded to me from a friend. Instead of a new innovation, this is a series of videos for a brand in one of the oldest commodity product categories on the market: the DieHard battery. You might remember the old DieHard commercials from the ’70s and ’80s that put car batteries in torture tests; for example, this ad in which a car on a frozen lake starts after sitting on the ice all winter.

Now DieHard is back in the demo business in a much more updated way, showing that even an existing brand and category has the ability to amaze. The dramatic movie-announcer-like voiceover is back, but just about everything else is different. Check it out:

There are some other examples of the ads that I love. For example, this one of innovative musician Reggie Watts. It’s pretty easy to measure success of these demos based on the number of views. Reggie Watts is getting up toward 900,000 views, and the Gary Numan example above is at 75,000 in less than a week.

While these companies are polar opposites in many ways, their viral product demos have a few things in common:

1. Presented in video form, which allows for a full sight, sound, and motion experience as well as easy sharing
2. Brought to life in very creative ways, not just a side-by-side demo with blue liquid and before-and-after shots
3. Go beyond the 30-second interruption, allowing space for a story to develop and for content to be enjoyed, on the consumer’s terms