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Because We are Happy

Before any of you start reading this blog, I have one question for you to answer.

Are you Happy?

If your answer is Yes, listen to the music below.
If your answer is No, same thing, I suggest you to listen to the music below.

I believe that most of you know this song really well. However, I would like to ask all of you one more question.

How did you know this song?

Your answers may vary. You may have heard it from the movie, Despicable me 2, radio station, music channel, restaurant, and also from Youtube.

What interesting about this song is that it just won Cyber Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity conference in France. Pharrell Williams,  composer, producer, and singer of this song, wanted to launch his single in a different way as well as to create user experience through this song with hope to create a happier world.

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A twenty-four hour interactive video featuring over 300 people dancing in Pharrell’s Happy song was created and uploaded on 24hoursofhappy.com website. Furthermore, twenty-four hour of Pharrell’s performance for the same song was uploaded on Youtube.

There were currently over 10 million viewers enjoying the interactive experience on the website with an average time of 6 minutes and the music video on youtube were seen more than 200 million times. Moreover, the sell of the track increased from 50,000 to 7 million copies in few weeks after the campaign launched.

The videos became viral causing people around the world wanting to share their own video. wearehappyfrom.com was created to serve people who want to share the video. So far, 1950 videos from 153 countries has been shared on the website.

This campaign has become a phenomenon. I always hear this song along the streets, in coffee shops and restaurants across the city. People know and are able to sing this song. More importantly, this campaign has created a huge power of consumer engagement. It has transformed a music into an engagement tool. Music has become a bridge between consumers and the campaign. I love the idea of this campaign. It is very simple, which I learned from many campaigns that consumers want the message to be easy to understand, to enjoy and the process to participate the activity is not too complicated.

 

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6 thoughts on “Because We are Happy”

  1. Consumer engagement is a very interesting topic that is now being employed by many companies and brands, but is still in its infancy. The idea of creating an engaged audience that won’t only increase the popularity and sales, supplying user-created (i.e. free) footage to be used in the video, and most importantly creating a true viewer experience is a brilliant idea. I am not surprised the Cyber grand prix from Cannes Lions 2014 went to this song. Truly inspiriting!

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    • I wish I weren’t so sick of this song, because I think this is such a cool phenomena. To think that technology has proliferated to the extent that there can be, basically, a global art project that includes interpretation and execution from people all over the world is simply amazing. I think this is just the beginning for consumer engagement, and that we have just scratched the surface of what an invested global audience is capable of creating.

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  2. Consumer engagement as a promotional tactic has been catching on in many industries. It has extended throughout the world increasing sales, in this case music, to an interactive place for consumers to join in the phenomenon. Interaction with the product and others has shown to be inspiring to people and an idea for connectivity for people and products. It is wonderful to see the talented people in the world and the inspiration that can come when an idea grows. It will be interesting to see the evolution of this tactic.

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  3. Engagement is very relevant to our topic to which we are speaking about in class. Audience engagement can vary so much. For instance people love the “Happy” song but then some of these same people can listen to Eminem style of music for 24 hours straight. In music people seem like they tend to listen based on their mood.

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  4. I think Pharell’s use of the 25 hour video was a really great marketing tactic. It engaged his audience and challenged them. The advantage the song has is the amount of people it has currently touched! We have seen so many people do their own rendition of happy because his song has made everyone happy!!

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  5. It seems that no matter in which industry, engaging audiences always comes the first. And I like you did a well-rounded analyzing on how Pharrell Williams produced this song and made it popular. There are many similar examples, which merchants tried to used to get their consumers involved and help them spread their products. Your post helped to explained this phenomena very well!

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