Harnessing the power of the crowd.
By now, most of us have seen the jaw-droppingly bad video of Microsoft’s Songsmith software. If you haven’t, I encourage you to check it out below. (Warning: It’s 4:17 of your life you’ll never get back.) Basically, Songsmith lets you sing lyrics and then it creates music to go along with your singing.
But a funny thing happened on the way to music software Hell. Songsmith became ironically cool.
Thanks to dozens if not hundreds of people with some time on their hands, Songsmith has become a huge underground remix hit – taking classic songs sung by the original artists and letting Songsmith do its magic. The results are hilarious. Simply do a YouTube search for “Microsoft Songsmith” and you’ll get gems like this:
But the million dollar question for advertisers is, how do we catch this kind of cultural lightning in a bottle? How do we harness the power of virtual crowds to take a product or service and run with it to places we never dreamed of? Can we help this process along or must it occur organically? How can we re-imagine what we’re advertising and give it new life in new ways?
Those are questions I certainly don’t have the answer to. But maybe just by being aware that there’s a potential whole re-use universe out there for our clients’ products, we can take advantage of these memes and use them to our advantage.
Filed under: Crowd-sourcing | Closed
Tags: crowd_sourcing, Microsoft, music, remix
