13B Lip Sync track

We had 5 tracks pitched for filming a music vid: Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine"; Mike Posner's "Cooler Than Me"; Duck Sauce's "Barbra Streisand"; a Paolo Nutini track; and Taylor Swift's "You Belong To Me". The "Barbra Streisand" track was setlled on, with planning now underway for the shoot. The official music video is embedded below (from muzu.tv, not YouTube, which I think you can access under student logins):

Duck Sauce - Barbra Streisand
You'll see the design of this vid could easily inspire tribute versions, an attractive idea for most acts as this acts rather nicely as a means of generating viral marketing: marketing the band do not pay for, and which does not have the appearance of an advertising campaign. The success of the Yeo Valley (milk/dairy company) rap, (one of several similar ideas: see this Ontario vid, + rather awful raps such as this), played exclusively in the X Factor ad breaks (at a campaign cost of £5m) has worked well like this - the YouTube video has been widely emailed and the company have been 'forced' by Facebook campaigns etc to release the song as an Xmas single. The "Barbra Streisand" video also features a daft dance move, another trick which can help encourage a video to be reconstructed, reflimed and posted (eg as 'responses' to YouTube uploads) online, a tactic used as far back as Adam and the Ants' "Prince Charming" video.

Music vids as ads

We've discussed 2 examples, both of which used the expensive but prestigious ad-breaks within Saturday's X Factor to launch the campaign. In each cases we can see a company looking to extend (or consolidate) its reach to the lower end of the youth market, 15-24, with humour the main tool used to achieve this.

I came across these examples by reading the Media Guardian online - can i urge you all again to flick through this from time to time...

We can take from this the widening use of the music video format; as well as commercials for bands/singles/albums/tours/merchandise, as well as 'art films', we are seeing the form used within advertising - an ad trying to disguise its status as an ad!

In the 2nd example we get a straightforward use of juxtaposition which you could consider yourselves: the urban, bling-heavy rap set and performed in a farm by supposed farmer types wearing country clothing! Nice effects with the tractor, the owl and quirky shots of cows all thrown in.



The song dates back to 1980, so as well as our core youth target audience we're looking at clear appeal to a secondary nostalgic mature youth market, 35-44.


As Media Monkey notes:

At first glance Monkey was mightily impressed with the breathtakingly fresh, unique and offbeat approach the ad agency BBH had taken creating dairy company Yeo Valley's first TV ad. It was a a well-planned debut: Create an ad of a bunch of young "farmers" performing a rap homage to their trade and hog an eye-wateringly expensive two-minute slot in The X Factor's first live knockout round on Saturday. Except it seems that the idea for the campaign may not be that new at all. It seems a Canadian TV campaign from a year ago, the "Milk Rap" by the Dairy Farmers of Ontario, which aimed to make milk a bit "cooler" (strapline: "It doesn't get any cooler than this") featured a bunch of, you guessed it, young hip farming typers rapping about the virtues of the white stuff.
Spot the difference, you decide: here's the Yeo Valley TV ad and the Canadian Milk TV ad .

There's a nice link from this into our 2nd stimulus song: Cars...