Sometimes when I am not posting blogs on a timely basis, it’s because I’ve become transfixed by videos like this:

You’ll like it better with headphones.

I’m sure I’m the only one who notices this stuff.

If you’ve been awake at any time during the past 6 months, you’ve heard that ‘Someone That I Used to Know‘ song by Gotye.  It’s a pretty good song, and a strangely compelling video, but I found myself feeling kind of sorry for poor old Kimbra, the woman who duets with Gotye on the track.  While his parents apparently supported him while he noodled around in a farmhouse somewhere, Kimbra’s been working her backside off trying to become a pop artist for years.

So I was happy to see that Victoria’s Secret has decided to use Kimbra’s song ‘Settle Down’ in their new commercials:

It’s a good choice in some ways:  It’s got a distinctive beat and they’ve given it a remix with a lot of breathiness and echo that works well with the visuals.  

But on the other hand, having heard the original song in its entirety, and watched the video – a sort of Stepford Wives-esque parody – I wonder if it was entirely the right choice:

Then I realize I’m probably the only person in the world who worries about this stuff, and remarking on it is part of the reason I never mastered the politics of ad agencies, where it doesn’t do to overthink these things.

However, it did get me thinking – and not for the first time – about music licensing, and how it’s become such a cornerstone of an artist’s ability to make money in the music business, rather than a sign of selling out.  Moby, for example, has publicly regretted his ‘overlicensing’ of tracks, especially in English-speaking countries, but no one ever seems to criticize Justin Timberlake for turning one of his songs into an entire McDonald’s campaign.

The JT song you probably never heard:

And the McDonald’s campaign you know all too well:

(It’s true you may not remember this particular commercial – it’s the director’s cut and was only shown on TV a handful of times.  But the “I’m lovin’ it” tagline is still being used.)

What about the money?

Ah, yes, the money.  How much do artists get for licensing tracks like this?

Well, there’s where it gets a little tricky, because no one talks about the deals, and I’ve just spent almost 30 minutes searching for hard data on that, without success.  

Twelve years ago I was told, by a longtime music industry type who was in a position to know, that Steve Goodman’s widow was offered $350,000 to use the chorus from ‘The City of New Orleans‘ (which he wrote) in a laxative commercial in the mid-1980s.  This seems high, since it would only have been for mechanicals, but perhaps I’m underestimating the power of broadcast media back in the day.  

In the mid-2000s, a PR exec told me that Justin Timberlake had been paid $10 million for ‘I’m Lovin’ It’ and that seems reasonable, given that he appeared in the original ads, the campaign was worldwide, and they were using the name of the song as a tagline.  Plus it was a bit of a gamble for McDonald’s in 2003, since Timberlake’s first solo album was just about to drop and no one could really be sure that he’d be able to shed his former boy-band credibility gap.

On the other hand, I’ve licensed songs from unknown artists for $100.  So the answer to the money question is probably a complicated formula involving (the artist’s agent’s negotiating skills x the artist’s brand equity) + (artist’s current level of desperation x potential for exposure).

Anyway, today’s blog didn’t have a particularly insightful point to make, I suppose.  Except:  I’d really like to see a peer-reviewed research paper which quantified the sales increases directly attributable to the use of 80s new wave music in commercials designed for a target audience of university-educated 40-somethings.  Because I’m almost positive there is a demonstrable connection between the two.

Did you really mean to associate your brand with racism?

Back in 1990, when I was a junior columnist at the university newspaper, a fierce debate arose: The local tanning salon wanted to advertise in the paper, and their ad included a picture of a model-thin woman in a bikini.  Today, the debate might be about whether it was ethical to promote a potentially cancer-causing product to young people; twenty years ago, it was all about whether it was ethical to contribute to the objectification of women by accepting ads featuring scantily-clad bikini babes.

(Are kids these days still this idealistic about this kind of thing?  I wonder.)

Ultimately, of course, the argument turns on freedom of speech:  There’s a fine line between refusing to publish content or advertising that is generally accepted to be offensive or inflammatory and stifling freedom of speech by quashing all dissenting or differing opinions.  If you refuse an ad for a tanning salon because you think that photos of women in bikinis send the wrong message to young women, must you also refuse ads from bathing suit manufacturers which feature women modeling the bathing suits?  What, exactly, does a women have to wear in an ad in order to make it acceptable for your publication?  Will you apply the same standards to men?  Who gets to decide?

You see the problems here.

User-generated content is hard to control

I got thinking about this a couple of days ago when I fell down one of those YouTube rabbit holes and found myself watching a video by a guy called Ramzpaul (NSFW), who calls himself a ‘nationalist’ or sometimes ‘white nationalist’.  

Ramzpaul is smarter than most of the other white pride types on YouTube:  He positions himself as a ‘satirist’, doesn’t spew hate speech indiscriminately, and has closed down the comments on most of his 481 videos – so it takes a few minutes to figure out that he is in fact a racist who’s quite popular on Stormfront discussion boards (not gonna link to that one – I’ll let you look it up yourself), where they like the fact that his pro-white message is subtle enough to reach his fellow nationalists without us non-racists getting upset.  The core message of the video entitled “Support Marriage Equality”, for example, is that people who think it’s okay for people to marry same-sex partners must also think that it’s okay to marry (and have sex with) animals – but because he’s given the video a ‘liberal-friendly’ title and gone with a ‘satirical’ theme, he comes across as ‘just a guy with some opinions’.

In fact, he’s done it so well that YouTube has made him a partner and is running ads on his videos:

^{(I’m not going to link to any of Ramzpaul’s videos here, for obvious reasons. Screenshots will have to do.)}

In the past 24 hours, I’ve seen ads for Katy Perry, Jugnoo, Canada Works 2025 and, as in the screenshot above, for the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation either on Ramzpaul’s page or running before his videos.  I don’t know Katy Perry personally, of course, but I’m pretty sure neither she nor any of the other brands I’ve seen associated with Ramzpaul’s channel would be all that happy about it. 

Though I will say there is some sweet irony in the fact that there’s an ad promoting Toronto’s Gay Pride week preceding the “Support Marriage Equality” video:

Ramzpaul may be more subtle and less vitriolic than some of really hardcore racist garbage on YouTube, but he’s still promoting a fairly offensive worldview, and I tend to think that it’s the more subtle stuff that does the most damage, because it seems so reasonable at first:  “Oh, I’m just being satirical!  Oh, it’s just my opinion – it’s not hate speech!”

Where do you draw the line?

YouTube does a fairly good job of removing – or at least sidelining – users who are obviously racist, violent, copyrighted, etc.  But with 48 hours’ worth of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, it can be hard for them to keep up.  And anyway, where do they draw the line?  I think most people would find Ramzpaul’s worldview offensive, but if he’s hiding behind humour, not actively promoting violence, and staying carefully away from incendiary language – we’re back to the bikini question:  Where do you draw the line between ‘hate speech’ and ‘freedom of speech’, and how do you make that decision?  

Sometimes I have big thoughts. Other times I don’t.

^{Image via this site.}

Having a blog is one of those things which really forces you to face your limitations.  There are people in my life who would say that I am definitely ‘creative’, but I can’t escape the fact that if I was, in fact, really a ‘creative thinker’, I would manage to post something interesting more than once a week. 

Ah well.

While I try to dream up something interesting for you to read, here are the things I’ve been thinking about this week:

1. Why are people using these goofy smiley faces in their Twitter names?

I don’t know if I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole or what, but suddenly a whole bunch of people I’m following on Twitter are using 

ツ

in their Twitter names.  Why?  What does it mean?  Is it a special club?  The fruit of some guru’s workshop on Effective Personal Branding in Social Media?  I don’t like it.  I don’t know how to replicate it, either.

 

2.  How do boring people get so popular on Twitter?

The person referenced above often tweets gems like “When you feel down, go be a blessing to somebody else…it always makes you feel better!”.  And yet she has 75k followers.  And is supposedly a Forbes Top 50 Social Media Power Influencer.  I do not understand this.  

 

3.  The weird story of Lama Christie and her husband’s death

A few years ago, Slate ran a story about Michael Roach and Christie McNally, two ‘Buddhist Monks’ who’d gone on a retreat during which they’d vowed to stay within 15 feet of each other – for 3 years.  In April, ‘Lama Christie’ was found delirious beside her new husband’s dead body in a cave near their ‘monastery’, from which they’d been expelled. The whole story seems strange, and for some reason I’ve become a little obsessed with it.

 

4.  Miranda Hart, comedienne

The other day I got engrossed in what Max calls “another of my British Period Dramas” and was taken with one of the supporting actresses, Miranda Hart.  I’d never heard of her – though I probably should have – and discovered she has her own comedy show in the UK.  She is very, very funny, and I offer this (long, but worth it) clip as evidence:

 

4(a) The above-referenced “British period drama” was Call the Midwife.

It’s about a young woman who goes to work as a midwife and district nurse in the East End of London in the 1950s, and what she finds there.  It got great reviews and some BAFTA TV award nominations, but I’m almost positive its core demographic is women aged 49+, so I won’t go on too much about it.

 

5.  Fiona Apple is a fantastic lyricist.  Or maybe poet.

Look, I’ll admit that I couldn’t really get behind Extraordinary Machine, even though I’d loved Fiona Apple‘s previous two albums.  But she’s got a new album out, and it’s hard not to love a title like “The Idler Wheel is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve you More than Ropes Will Ever Do.”  No, I don’t know exactly what it means, but who cares?  There’s a rhythm to those words that you just can’t beat.  (See what I did there?)

There’s a very nice video, too:

It’s possible that Fiona Apple is a totally insufferable artiste in real life, of course, as some have claimed – but I feel almost certain that a girl who’s willing to wear an octopus on her head must have a sense of humour in there somewhere.

There’s a big difference between ‘word of mouth’ and ‘enforced spam’.

^{(Image via this site.)}

Christmas of 2009 was when I first got a little obsessed with Zynga games.  My cousin had been killed in Afghanistan on December 23, and the holiday season wasn’t exactly filled with joy.  I found myself spending the week between Christmas and New Years sitting at my computer, numbing my brain with Farmville.  

To me it was a lot like the Lego I loved as a kid: I leveled up to a huge farm and really liked arranging the various ‘items’ in optical-illusion mountains and rivers and estates. I admit I spent money – probably $100 over the course of that Christmas holiday.

What I didn’t like was Farmville’s incessant demands to push the game to my Facebook friends. You couldn’t so much as sell a virtual sheep without a pop-up asking you to ‘share’ the big event with everyone in Facebook, and even spending money didn’t keep the game from demanding you ‘invite’ friends to do stuff in order to progress to other levels.  

I’m quite sure that I lost Facebook friends over this, because many people found it easier simply to ‘unfriend’ me than to ‘turn off all Farmville notifications’ on their timelines.

Eventually I was sucked into CityVille and CastleVille, too, until, like an addict, I finally got so disgusted with myself that I deleted them all.  

However, I’m still getting notifications from CastleVille, because apparently deleting the application from your Facebook apps isn’t enough – Zynga continues to store your information on their servers and despite 15 minutes of searching, I still can’t figure out how to delete my information from those servers.

Zynga has always been a bit evil

If you’ve been following Zynga for the past few years, you know that they’ve always had a sketchy track record.  Founder Mark Pincus, accused of unethical spamming in 2009, famously admitted that they’d do “anything” to drive users and revenue.  

And for a while, this approach seemed to work:  With tens of millions of users and a December 2011 IPO that reached almost $10 billion, Zynga looked like the first Facebook-based games company to achieve big success.

However, the market doesn’t love ‘evil’ for long:

^{(Image via this site.)}

CityVille, CastleVille and FarmVille have all lost half their users in the past 6 months, and they’ve taken half of Zynga’s share price with them, now at $5 from a high of $10.

What’s happened?

Industry analysts are suggesting that the decline of Zynga is a signal that the golden age of Facebook-based games is over, and point to recent DAU (daily average users) statistics as proof:

I’ve seen plenty of commentary saying that the reason for this widespread decline is because users are increasingly moving to mobile games that they can play on their iPhone or Android.  But I’m not so sure:  Zynga’s sweetspot for the -Ville games was always women in the 40+ category, and they’re not the ones migrating to iPads en masse.

No, I think the problem is embarrassment.  It’s simply become too embarrassing to play Zynga games on Facebook, because you know that everyone hates getting notifications about it in their newsfeed, and it’s almost impossible to completely ‘hide’ your playing patterns from all your friends.  It’s hard to really enjoy playing a game when you can’t feel good – or private – doing it.

What’s more, Zynga relied on continual Facebook feed-spamming to attract new users; now that active users are reluctant to let anything hit their timeline, and non-users have blocked as many notifications from the games as they can, there’s no top-of-mind awareness to drive new users.

So what have we learned?

I think Zynga’s rise and fall has some good lessons for marketers in the age of social media:

• Spam only works for so long.  You can achieve initial success by relentlessly pushing your message to uncomfortable levels, especially if you’re delivering a decent product (and the Zynga games are well-designed, for the most part).  But eventually both your users and your non-users get fed up
• When your brand starts being embarrassing, you have a problem.  In the absence of spam, you have to rely on word-of-mouth.  If people are embarrassed to say they’re using your product, you can’t generate the word-of-mouth you need to keep growing
• Long-term credibility is better than short-term hype.  I’m quite certain that Mark Pincus et al thought, in December 2011, that they were business geniuses.  After all, their “we’ll do anything for traffic” approach had driven them to a multi-billion-dollar valuation.  But now they’ve got a big problem, because it’s going to be harder for them to attract new users to new games, whether they’re Facebook- or mobile-based
• One bad apple can ruin the whole category.  It’s my opinion that Zynga is almost single-handedly responsible for the decline in usage of other Facebook games:  Zynga’s spamming tactics have made everyone wary of allowing any games to access their timelines – so it’s harder than it used to be for new games to get traction.