If this doesn’t make you want to run out an buy an iPhone, it will certainly make you want to pick up the Atomic Tom single “Take Me Out.” This music video was filmed, unannounced (though hardly spontaneously), last week Friday aboard a New York City train over the Manhattan Bridge.
To be clear, this isn’t an iPhone commercial (Directed by Benjamin Espiritu and produced with Atomic Tom) yet may be one of the best guerrilla / viral marketing campaigns we’ve seen this year. Brilliantly leveraging a spontaneous setting, great content, an innovative performance, and, most importantly, pop culture, Atomic Tom has well-deservedly thrust themselves in the spotlight.
Not only are the instruments played all iPhone based but the shoot was filmed and edited with 3 iPhone cameras (iMovie I suspect). Other apps featured by the band include iShred, Drum Meister, PocketGuitar, and Piano Virtuoso.
Marketing Atomic Tom
On the more troubling side of this experience, from the marketing perspective, Atomic Tom provides yet another sign of a trend amongst brands against owning their own domain. (yes, I know… how’d I make that leap?)
Stemming from a legacy left by AOL (AOL Keyword…), brands are increasingly abandoning their own website in favor of using only Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace. While consumer brands rarely avoid running their own website, they all too often turn to off-domain landing pages or replacements to their own infrastructure. Sure, bands and artists have long done this, and it is arguably less expensive (though debatably so when you can create your own very polished website for a few hundred dollars), the real question for me is why brands so willingly give up equity in their brand to something else.
How do you weigh in on the question of brand equity vs. the benefits of a third party hosted experience?
Bah… enough about work; what do you think of Atomic Tom?
