Droga5 drafts in Vanilla Ice for Virgin Mobile work
Some of the highest profile work yet from Sydney start-up Droga5 has debuted, with an online campaign for Virgin Mobile featuring 80s rapper Vanilla Ice.
The campaign, which is spearheaded by a video of the musician apologising for his track Ice Ice Baby, is designed to lead online users to the Right Music Wrongs web site, where they are encouraged to debate the worst pieces of music of all time.
Virgin Mobile says the video has already been viewed around 300,000 times, and that the site itself has attracted around 44,000 unique visitors.
“We have been able to create a campaign that encourages genuine consumer involvement, on a moderate budget, by working with Vanilla Ice and one of the most recognisable songs on the planet,” claimed Droga 5’s Sudeep Gohill.
There will be further activation of the campaign at the V Music festival later this month and through radio advertising with Nova. Agencies Thought By Them, MPG and One Green Bean are also involved in the campaign
According to the website Viral Video Chart, online discussion of the video briefly spiked last week, but quickly fell away.
The work is not the first from Droga5 since the agency began in 2007 with former Saatchi and Saatchi ECD Danid “Nobby” Nobay at its helm. But it has so far made less impact on the Australian ad industry than might have been expected – partly because major plans for client VB are understood to have been pushed back.
However, the work is not quite the first for Droga5 Sydney. It created some ads for VB Gold last year and has also did the launch campaign for V Australia. But Droga5 Sydney is yet to create the kind of buzz generated by its US parent, headed by Aussie Dave Droga, who is among the most awarded creatives of all time.
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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Good old David.
Nice to see his name up in lights again.
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Wow, that’s really not funny.
To quote mumbrella from earlier today:
# charlierobinson: no longer high numbers are important in metrics… influence and results to engage thru is more
# jyesmith: Smirnoff: less about amount of traffic and more about quality of engagement (length of time etc). rather than quant clicks, views
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Where’s the graph from?
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Sorry, I should be more specific – where on Viral Video Chart did you grab that graph?
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Hi Matt – link to Viral Video Chart is here: http://www.viralvideochart.com.....bAUi7savsk
Cheers,
Tim
Agency list sounds like cast of thousands..
The Sound Alliance (In The Mix, et al) claimed credit for the campaign (with Droga5) in a market-update email last week..
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Err, just realised you said Thought By Them were involved. Will go back inside my cave now.
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It’s so bland! Poor script, barely acting.
That chart above absolutely smacks of artificial seeding, then falling flat as soon as it’s in the hands of the punters.
I think the wrong David is behind this one.
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‘I want the real Droga’, what do you mean by artificial seeding? As opposed to.. genuine seeding? I’m genuinely interested..
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“i want the real droga” i agree. this just sums up the gulf between David N and David D.
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i like the site and the overall idea (anything that brings back milli vanilli wearing tux jackets and 3/4 length bike pants is good) but think the hero viral (cliche trademark pending) is pretty weak. ice’s acting is as geniune as his theatrical debut ‘cool as ice’.
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Wow! A graph! One that goes up then down. It even got up to 40+ blog posts on one day – hard to tell without the axis being labelled. So that’s 40 sad souls who bothered. It might even accumulate to 100+ over the period of the graph. If that’s engagement then I’m a monkey’s uncle.
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370,000 youtube views
4.5 star rating from 1400 raters
2,341 comments
#1 most discussed music vid in Au this month
Top favourited in Au this week
Seems like the public has spoken. Whether that translates to brand goodness for Virgin I dunno but the fact the video is ‘engaging’ is un-disputable surely…
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Damn, bang goes the zoo-related song I just did for Optus filmed live at Taronga Zoo.
“yes, hammertime”.
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