You may have seen the Ok Go’s last video “Here It Goes Again” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv5zWaTEVkI) aka “the Treadmill Video”. It became Youtube’s favorite with over 50 mil views and put them on top 40 chart in the US. Their label EMI disabled the embed function for their videos, so they cannot distribute them virally any more.
So what did Ok Go do? They left EMI and created their own label and found another way to finance their music video “This Too Shall Pass” from their new album.
They turned to corporate sponsorship, but this is not one of those cheesy fake BS sponsorships. It turned out to be an unusual great partnership and resulted in a “win-win” situation for both of them. State Farm sponsored their video with small acknowledgments (truck with SF logo and SF teddy bear incorporated in the video, and thank you note at the end). The band got their video made without any creative compromise and State Farm got some cred among the demographic who are skeptical of big corporates. Not to mention both received good amount of media coverage.
This video features pretty an amazing Rube Goldberg contraption. It took a little over 60 takes and 60 engineers to get it right, and got 6 mil views in the first week.
Posted on Monday, 15 March 2010
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