Article Submissons vs youtube blog vs something else??

Hi Everyone, I hope this is the right forum for this question.

I am was about to start doing some kind of article-type campaign for a local real estate company. My goals are to improve local and organic rankings as well as bring in more leads to the company by virtue of these articles ranking on google when someone does a search.

Several years ago i used to work for a seo company and a big part how we got sites to rank was to write informational articles and submit them to article directories like ezinearticles. We would get good links to the websites and the articles themselves would often rank individually drive traffic to the site. I have been researching this method and have been reading that recently these article directories have been significantly devalued by google and these articles don't really give much benefit...so i am thinking that this isn't the best way to go.

I have been thinking that maybe the best way to go is to do a video blog on youtube and do informational video articles on there. I don't have any experience doing this but i think that i would still get good links back to my website as well as hopefully having these rank individually on search results. In addition, I could post these on the website as blog entries and they would get some play on youtube itself.

I was hoping to get some opinions on if this is a good way to go or if there is some other option that I haven't thought of. Thanks for your input on this.