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Years & Years debut release to be promoted with quirky ad break
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 10 July 2015
So it’s New Music Friday everybody, a brave new age in putting CDs on racks and uploading WAV files to servers. Excited? Of course you are. Stop pretending you’re totally indifferent.
To celebrate new music coming out on Fridays in general, and more specifically new music from Years & Years coming out this very Friday, tonight Channel 4 will air a very special ad break at 9.45pm in amongst the latest edition of ‘8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown’, so people will be looking forward to the ads more than you might normally think.
But what will happen in this very special ad break? Well, the Years & Years boys have recorded three different performances of their new single ‘Shine’ and viewers will be able to control which one is seen at any one moment by tweeting with special hashtags.
It’s a “global broadcasting first” by the way, the hope being that such innovation will be sufficiently exciting to tear the kids away from Snapchat and Yik Yak for just two minutes, and onto the social network of choice for aging broadcasters and ad industry execs, to have some Years & Years social interaction good times. Which means it’s also actually a highly academic social experiment. Someone’s going to get an MSc out of all this if nothing else.
The whole thing’s the result of a collaboration between the band’s label Polydor, Channel 4 Sales and ad/marketing firms MediaCom and The Outfit. Say Years & Years of the quirky ad campaign: “We love the idea of giving our fans control of a music video and the immediacy of it happening live. We had a lot of fun playing with the different themes of light and we hope the audience enjoy experiencing our music in this new way”.
Any “kids” out there wondering what the hell Channel 4 and “TV advertising” are, don’t worry, you can also experience all this via the band’s website. Though, alas, there wasn’t time to have the whole venture integrated with the interactive video tab in the super buzzy FlibFlob Android app, mainly on account of it being a figment of my imagination. Anyone want to set up the super buzzy FlibFlob Android app with me? It’ll be fun.
Talking of social experiments, which we were, as one of the most anticipated debuts of the year, Years & Years’ album ‘Communion’ will provide an interesting case study to assess the impact of both Apple Music and the global release day on new albums and new artists. From a label perspective mind, the band themselves seem to be doing fine whatever happens.
And if you want to know even more about Years & Years here’s an interview Popjustice did with frontman Olly Alexander. Just mentioning it here because I don’t think it got enough tweets yesterday. And even if it did, as discussed, all the kids were too busy FlibFlobbing to notice.
