Lately I’ve begun to feel like every second track by a ‘new’ act that I happen upon online or that arrives in my inbox is a remix. This week, those included a
Delorian remix of a track by calypso-choral LA woman Glasser, whose debut album will arrive to us via Remote Control Records soon; a Julian Mendelsohn (he produced some Pet Shop Boys in the ‘80s, amongst others, and now resides in Melbourne)
remix of Swimming Pool by Sydney’s most excellent Catcall (pictured; download the track free at the link), and a
John Talabot remix of The xx’s Shelter. Some of the reasons for sending out remixes or making them free downloads from label sites or blogs are obvious: they are a way of promoting an act’s album without giving the album’s tracks away; they keep acts whose albums have been out a while (such as The xx) in listeners’ consciousness, and they lend themselves to play on radio and in clubs in which the act may otherwise not have been given a look-in. But there’s another reason, particularly for acts being led by their labels into wider markets, and it’s fast becoming one of the most used terms in online marketing: those who remix are also seen as ‘influencers’.
In broader online marketing, ‘influencers’ are the latest ‘hot’ target for viral campaigns and product placement. This has always been the case with traditional media, however the nature of social media, the transience of blogs and the general (and growing) cynicism of people being marketed to in their ‘personal’ space means it’s no longer as simple as sending out a few products to magazine editors and ‘celebrities’ and hoping they’ll spread the word (soz,
Andrew G). A July post in the blog run by domain provider Netregistry took a look at the recent Old Spice campaign and the way it used ‘influencers’ as its target market. In Australia, the source advertisement in which a ripped dude ends a series of random events with the lingering ‘LOL’, “I’m on a horse,” was passed around without any involvement by an Australian agency.
In the US, however, the process was longer and more interactive. The agency running the campaign mobilised a team of ‘creatives’ and was churning out new, original Old Spice videos featuring Old Spice Man in response to questions and comments made on the Old Spice Twitter account. These videos were mostly aimed directly at online ‘influencers’ – people like famed San Fran vlogger
Kevin Rose and D-list stalker
Perez Hilton – in the hope that if they personalised their message, those ‘influencers’ would then spread the campaign to their millions of ‘followers’ out of ego. The Netregistry blog contends that the target market for Old Spice wasn’t the ‘influencers’ or even their direct audience, but could have been as far removed as three people from the influencer’s reach –as long as the message filtered down, without the spend of a national traditional media campaign and while grabbing the attention of a ‘media-savvy’ audience, the idea worked.
The term ‘influencers’ has been getting thrown around in advertising for a couple of years, but its stronghold as a buzzword is tightening. A web app called
Klout, launched in 2009 and slowly building its name amongst online ‘entrepreneurs’, allows users to sign in and get a measurement reading of their ‘influence’ via Twitter, measuring a person’s ‘true reach’ and giving them an overall ‘influence score’ out of 100. With information like this, some of the marketing power is potentially handed back to the ‘influencers’ themselves, rather than being held solely by the companies targeting them, allowing them to pitch themselves to companies and therefore share in a bit of the cash being put into such ventures.
The logical – also gross and cynical – conclusion is that remixers can get in on this action and gauge their own online marketing reach in order to put themselves forward for further work. Of course, the further we dig into the research and measuring of social media, the more convoluted once simple ideas become. After all, aren’t sales, or even creative reach, the ultimate indicators of influence? Maybe Ferris Bueller really did say it best when talking up his sick-day clammy hands foil – “It’s a good non-specific symptom. I’m a big believer in it.”
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