What Brands Can Do with Hidden Music Video Memes

Brands are missing a huge opportunity in video, and most of them probably have no idea it even exists. The irony is that it’s hidden beneath the biggest viral properties on the web.

After examining how brands use celebrities in last month's column, this month Visible Measures' director of marketing Matt Fiorentino, looks into how brands could leverage the opportunities that hugely successful online music videos provide.

Music video mania

If you look at all the video published online – user generated content, movie trailers, video games trailers, branded video, news, music videos, professional content, vlogs, web series, etc. – music videos, like Beyonce's Single Ladies [above], are easily the biggest viral hits on the web. But what most people don’t realise is that beyond the view count they see on YouTube, there are hundreds of millions of views coming from thousands of videos that were inspired by the original music videos.

These videos fly below the radar for most brands because many of them are created by users, and user-generated content is typically avoided by brands. As a result, there are hundreds of millions of views going untapped for savvy marketers.

But we’re not talking about finding new videos to advertise against. That would be boring. Plus, it’s already starting to happen to a certain extent. Instead, the opportunity and the videos we’re talking about here should provide the inspiration for brands to tap into behaviors and audiences that have generally gone unacknowledged until now.

Don't be annoying

You might be thinking – ‘don’t brands just create annoying 30-second ads to interrupt us?’ What could they do with UGC around music videos, if not annoy us even more? These are entirely legitimate questions.

But there’s a new reality for brands today. Many of them aren’t simply creating the 30-second ads so many of us can’t stand, they’re creating videos that are truly fun and entertaining, insightful and captivating. Look at Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches campaign [pictured below] from last year, with over 180 million views on its own, to see what’s possible. 2013 saw over 8.3 billion views from branded videos.

This new paradigm for brands is centered on content creation. The problem has been, and will likely continue to be for a very long time (until the robots take over), that creating great content is terribly difficult. This is why the brands that look to the hidden memes of music videos can find a treasure trove of inspiration on videos that are relatively easy to produce and are already generating millions of views.

The hidden memes are generally consistent across music videos. Some vary based on the artist – you won’t find many make-up tutorials for male artists. Others are based on the actual video – there won’t be instructional videos on how to do a dance if there is no dance. But, overall, you’ll find most of the memes identified here across most music videos.

Best meme ever?

To reveal some of these hidden memes, let’s look at the winner of the 2014 BRIT Awards Best Video, Best Song Ever by One Direction. The original music video on YouTube/VEVO has over 215 million views. The ‘True Reach’ of the music video [the combined view count of over 100 videos related to the music video] is over 300 million (we only analysed videos with over 100,000 views for Best Song Ever).

These 100-plus videos include;

- videos with the song lyrics (21 million views from 14 videos)

- parodies and variations (14 million views from nine videos)

- live performances (10.2 million views from 10 videos)

- covers (6.3 million views from 12 videos)

- variations (1.1 million views from five videos)

- Spanish translations (1.1 million views from five videos)

- instrumental covers (1 million views from six videos)

- audience reactions (1.2 million views from three videos)

- covers by the minions from Despicable Me (2.4 million views from three videos)

- covers by the Chipmunks (1.1 million views from three videos)

- dance tutorials (680,000 views from one video), and more.

Going in more than one direction

There’s some weird stuff here, so let’s focus on what brands can actually use.

Covers: 6.3 million views | 12 videos for Best Song Ever |

Music video covers are becoming increasingly sophisticated. You still find people singing in front of their webcam, but there are more professionally produced covers than ever before. Many upcoming artists are leveraging the SEO of the original music video by performing the cover, increasing their YouTube subscribers and pointing audiences to their original songs and upcoming concerts.

This is a savvy play by young artists and many of the covers are quite good (some say the covers are better than the originals, but I’ll let you be the judge of that). The obvious move here for brands is to sponsor a contest looking for the best cover for a popular song.

The brand could promote the videos throughout the voting stage of the contest, driving exposure and virality. The prize could be an album funded by the brand, giving them access and first rights to new talent, similar to an X Factor or American Idol.

Instrumental Covers: 1 million views | six videos for Best Song Ever |

Musicians of all stripes will jump on a new song, performing an instrumental rendition of the song. Brands could do a contest for these instrumental covers as well, but perhaps creating new content would be more interesting and effective here.

For example, if a brand has a celebrity at their disposal, perhaps they could learn how to play the song on the piano. Or, perhaps the brand could do a flash concert of the song (a mix between T-Mobile’s Dance and Welcome Back).

Or, maybe the brand gets a bad ass piano player to light up the keyboard doing a theme and variations on the song (the tone could fit the brand as needed). There are any number of creative paths here, all of which should be supported by paid promotion.

Parodies/Variations: 14 million views | nine videos for Best Song Ever |

When a music video reaches a certain level of exposure, parodies inevitably start pouring across the web. Parodies can be nasty, especially with boy bands, so brands should be careful with them.

However, if a brand’s audience is adamantly against a singer or song, the brand could score major points for producing or supporting a strong parody. Variations on the music video could be more palatable to brands because they don’t have to take a stance against a popular artist.

Variations of the insanely popular Harlem Shake have topped 1.5 billion views, with big brands like VW, Red Bull, and Pepsi MAX getting into the mix (they grabbed a combined 14+ million views, by the way, for their versions).

Minions/Chipmunks: 3.5 million views | six videos for Best Song Ever |

This is a weird one. The Chipmunks music video meme goes back a few years, but the Minions are relatively new. Either way, they use the same audio (and the Chipmunks should be worried about the minions stealing the spotlight).

Brands with younger audiences could license or create a cartoon character and produce and promote their own version of the music video. Why couldn’t Curious George, Thomas the Tank Engine, or Dora the Explorer do a version of Best Song Ever?

How-to Dance: 680,000 views | one video for Best Song Ever |

There isn’t much dancing in Best Song Ever, so the 680,000 views for the one how-to dance video is instructive. A sports apparel brand targeting young women could get a lot of mileage out of providing how-to dance videos for the biggest music videos.

To demonstrate how big these videos can get, one of the biggest how-to dance videos for Gangnam Style has over 17 million views.

Audience Reviews/Reactions: 1.3 million views | three videos for Best Song Ever |

The internet loves telling us what it thinks about everything. Music videos are no different. Brands could crowdsource reviews for a particular video and select the top-performers to promote.

Or, a brand could produce the reviews in-house. With enough reviews and paid promotion, this could easily be a 10 million view program with significant earned media.

Bonus: Make-up tutorials: None for Best Song Ever |

You’ll find makeup tutorials primarily for female artists. The example here is from Katy Perry’s California Gurls music video. The tutorial has produced over seven million views. Brands like Max Factor, L’Oreal, Estee Lauder, and others could sponsor or produce makeup tutorials for big music videos.

Music to our ears

No matter what meme a brand chooses, the key will be to stop advertising and start producing content designed to entertain or inform their audiences. As we’ve seen, the music video audiences are already there and they’re already consuming this type of content. Now, it’s up to the brands to start producing music video content of their own.