FreshNetworks Blog

With a little extra time on my hands this bank-holiday weekend, I thought I’d check out what’s new on YouTube. Wading past a fantastic dance-off video’s by ACDC and the Levi backflip guys I stumbled upon one of Radiohead‘s many digital marketing activities.

In case you don’t know them, Radiohead are one of the best bands to come out of the UK in the last 20 years. And they have embraced the internet with real vigour. Their last album, In Rainbows, was released online on a “pay-what-you-like” basis and in addition to selling 1.2 million copies this way, the album recently won a prestigious Best Album award in the UK.

To go with the album, they created a video-making competition. They asked for people to pick a track from the album and then create their own video to go with it. There are some cash rewards, but given the quality of the videos produced (and the time it must have taken to produce them) it’s clear that people are entering for the prestige and the desire to create and show their skills. To share their creations with other fans, or merely to show their support for their favourite band.

This is a fantastic way to increase engagement with and loyalty to the band. If you create a film, you know it’s going to be seen and voted on by other fans, but more importantly by the band. It’s also a way of allowing the fans to put their own stamp on a song (Radiohead’s music is particularly suited to this as each song can be interpreted in thousands of ways).

But what I really love about this marketing activity is that by generating loads of UGC videos it’s getting the songs out there and listened to by more and more people. I have just listened to one song three times – with a different video interpretation each time.

Measuring the ROI and value of social media activities is difficult and still in its infancy, but just the saving of the advertising costs needed to create this kind of exposure is huge.

Some examples

To see the quality and value of the amateur videos produced just look at the three below, all made by amateur fans as part of the online video-making competition.