In search of something to talk about
It’s common to bemoan the fact that labels no longer have the funds to deliver music video on the scale that characterised the glory days. Seemingly, however, insurance giants do. Witness, “This Too Shall Pass”, the latest bid for YouTube notoriety from famously web-smart band Ok Go, produced with funds from US insurance company State Farm.
You may remember the band from their breakthrough self-produced video for the song “Here It Goes Again”, the one in which they hop in syncronised fashion between treadmills. At one point it was getting as many as 10,000 views per day, before the band’s label EMI disabled the embedding feature on their YouTube content. Its views then plummeted to 1,000 per day.
If a better illustration of the internet’s mobilisation of a large number of diverse outlets, each with relatively small audiences, were available it certainly wouldn’t serve the dual purpose of highlighting major label hubris quite so perfectly. Here was a buzz of conversation spreading like ink on blotting paper as thousands of friends fell over each other to share a content experience, as blogs and newsletters, websites and newsfeeds squeezed Ok Go through a million different pipes onward to web infamy.
Now, fed up with their paymasters’ rearguard approach (read band member Damian Kulash’s ‘WhoseTube?’ article for The New York Times here) Ok Go have turned to corporate endorsement to overcome EMI’s ban on YouTube embeds and the clip is just shy of 7M views at time of writing, having been online a mere week. All this is great news for OK Go and for State Farm, who I’d certainly never heard of before.
The full extent of the digital strategy here appears to be: create a great piece of content, upload it and allow YouTube to function as it was intended. Which makes us think that, amidst all the talk of ‘conversation’ currently buzzing around smart digital circles, it’s worth remembering that ultimately everyone needs something to talk about.
