Customer Experience: Music Video

These days, if you are a popular band or up and coming musical act, the music video is as powerful a marketing tool as any. A good music video can mean accessibility to many more fans who may not know about the music yet or who haven’t heard of the particular artist. Music videos in popular music today are most definitely consumer experiences, as artists use these 3 or so minutes to connect with their audience on a visual and hopefully a personal level that cannot be achieved by just listening to the album. However, rarely does a music video make as big an impact as the actual song it displays or the source album.

One of my favorite bands, The Arcade Fire, released a new album this year called The Suburbs. I first heard about this new album online, but not before being first introduced to the video for the first single, called “We Used to Wait”. When I searched for the band I was directed to the website for the video (http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com). The link also informed me that I would need a computer with high processing capability (Windows 7 works best) and the new web browser, Google Chrome, to properly view this video. The website displays the words “The Wilderness Downtown” in a creepy looking font and there is a graphic of an even creepier flock of birds that flies across the screen. At the bottom, a dialog box told me to enter the address of the home where I grew up. After a loading screen, the video plays.

The fact that I had to enter the address where I grew up told me that this video was going to be personalized for me in some way. When the video started, the song started to play and a new window opened up on my computer showing a video of a boy running down a neighborhood street. More windows opened up on the same screen (sometimes overlapping) showing various aerial images of the street. The windows were constantly shifting, resizing, dropping out, and coming back into view. As more and more images flashed across the screen, I realized these weren’t just generic pictures of the suburbs. This was my street, with the house where I grew up and my neighborhood, all in clear focus. The video had used my address and images from Google Maps and Google Streetview to incorporate my actual childhood home into this song/video about growing up in the suburbs. An immediate wave of nostalgia swept over me and I was an instant fan of the song and the video. As the song continues to play, more images appear and there is even an interactive portion where you can type or write a message while the song is playing. The video goes even further mixing the graphics with the thematic elements to completely unify the song up to its dramatic conclusion, but the final result is pretty exciting. Needless to say, I was sold on the new music and bought the album right away.

With this new project, The Arcade Fire has elevated the music video from just a simple promotion tool to an actual customer experience that reaches and drives at the inner desires of the consumer. The feeling of nostalgia created by the images I recognized made me feel good and want to listen to the whole album. The video could be described as a type of sense marketing, because it appeals using images and graphics in a creative way. However, by combining this technology with the personal aspect, the video also impacted the way I felt about the music. It was completely unexpected and deeply effective.