Not disabling comments on youtube. That kind of thing.Īnd that’s about it. Making the song downloadable via iTunes, soundcloud and our website. That meant turning the whole thing into animated gifs for tumblr. It’s happy and silly and joyful and clever and more than a little odd the intangible things that are so hard to rationalise, but so very important.Īnd finally, but very importantly, we made sure the campaign was easy to share and discuss. Ultimately, it’s an ad that doesn’t feel anything like an ad. That augers well for both saliency of message, and shareability. Most people who see it want to watch it more than once. That’s when I first thought “shit, this is seriously going to work”. We’d all seen and heard it a hundred times, yet whenever it aired in the agency, people still stopped to look. But with Dumb Ways to Die, that moment never came. Not just that, but to load it with so many moments, you finish watching it and want to watch it again.Īnyone who’s ever made a commercial knows that there always comes a point when you’ve seen/heard it so many times during production that it drives you insane. The rest of the time was spent making the video as funny and likeable as possible. We were adamant that this couldn’t be an advertising piece of music – we wanted this to exist as a song in its own right. On a side note, I’m one of those people who listen to songs for the lyrics, so I’m quietly pleased to have written the words to a song that’s doing ok on iTunes. The lyrics were written with the visual story in mind: this had to work both as a song and as something the animator could work with. The decision to mix a morbid subject matter with saccharine levels of cute is what ultimately made it funny I think. We figured we’d double our chances and combine them both. Violence and sex is usually out for most brands, we couldn’t think of anything extremely awesome… so that left us with funny or super cute. Five kinds of things go viral: violence, sex, extreme awesomeness, funny or super likable/cute. So while our bullseye was young people, we always wanted to make something that practically everyone could like. Suess, and I always admired his ability to talk to a specific target audience (kids) while also appealing to everyone else. Our next decision, and the critical one really, was how to execute this. Who wouldn’t click on ‘dumb ways to die’? If we titled this piece ‘Be safe around trains’ would it have worked as well? Not a chance. Your campaign needs a good title.ĭumb Ways to Die is a good title because it’s succinct, evocative and very suggestive of reward-for-effort. I’m a big believer in titles, and as advertising moves from paid interruptions to a storytelling model, it’s something we all should pay much more attention to. In a world dominated by spin, honesty in itself can be disarming and refreshing. I think the title helps. Not many advertisers allow themselves to be that honest about things, but Metro did and that’s a great starting point.
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