For example, an integrated strategy ensures high levels of awareness but it’s very expensive to create a TV show (or spot), advertise it on a number of channels and staff various social networks to ensure that conversations are maintained with users.

On the flip side, a grassroots viral strategy (Rage asking their fans to buy with very little paid media and no production) can prove effiective and can be very cheap. That said, if you’re not a brand that already has a passionate fanbase, it can be very hard to get something to resonate (and I’m ignoring the dozens of entertaining YouTube video’s that happen to go viral!)

Smart marketers try to use both strategies; develop a large, integrated and holistic campaign and try to augment it with some grassroots (re: cheap) approaches that could take off if they are seeded and discussed among the right people.

Excellent topic and great post.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?v=feed&story_fbid=381567860704&id=572850559&ref=mf

*That info is from a blog, so may not be altogether accurate, but I do remember the ad, since it stirred up controversy and contempt.

My understanding is that up until end of the ’90s the LAPD ran a semi-military (‘urban pacification’) model of policing that tried to make do with relatively few officers overall (relative to the population size they had 1/4 the cops of NYC IIRC), but then to deploy massive, overwhelming force in rapid response to outbreaks of violence etc.. That model’s supposed to have been replaced by a more conventional neighborhood policing model, but go here to confirm that the LAPD’s connection to the military is nonetheless still very strong. E.g.,
LAPD officers that are military veterans are highly encouraged to wear their military ribbons on their LAPD uniform.
Anyhow, this is the level at which I took Rage’s more general points to connect up with LAPD stuff. Rage shared with NWA et al. an image of East LA as Beirut/Baghdad under occupation by US forces.

Lastly, sorry if my previous note was a bit grouchy. It’s certainly true that many interesting bands with aggressive sounds (e.g., Nirvana, Fugazi) have been publicly troubled by some of the ‘meathead’/'fratboy’/etc. audience they attract, and I should not have suggested that there’s anything wrong with anyone *else* having the sorts of qualms that the bands themselves often have had.

Follow Tom’s template:
‘Heroes’ plays, gets a response, and someone scowls from the shadows YOU’RE NOT HEROES YOU ARE OXFORD UNIVERSITY STUDENTS DRINKING TWO QUID SNAKEBITE AT AN INDIE DISCO.
Dre plays, gets a response, and someone scowls YOUR FINGERZ AREN’T ON ANY TRIGGERZ YOU ARE OXFORD UNIVERSITY STUDENTS DRINKING TWO QUID SNAKEBITE AT AN INDIE DISCO.
And so on. How depressing. I assume we’ve all been there, but it’s not pretty.

I somehow managed to avoid any particular social associations with Rage and encountered them pretty strictly as music, from which perspective KITNO feels pretty awesome. It reminds me a lot of the Who’s ‘I can see for miles’ in terms of its basic energy level, and distinctiveness – the sense that nobody else plays together like this. And KITNO’s lyrics are certainly no more vague than ICSFM’s. That lead-off repeated couplet, ‘Some of those at work forces/Are the same that bore crosses’, in particular, resonates pretty strongly these days after a decade of Blair and Bush. (The couplet also makes the song a little subversive for xmas.) Ironically, it may resonate in future even more strongly as theological/eschatological terms seep into all the anguish around climate change, where it’s Rage’s WTO-protesting children carrying the crosses and summoning righteousness.

Rather than being nostalgic for the supposed ‘Christmas #1 importance/battle excitement’ I’m almost ending up nostalgic for non-joke songs this angry (convincingly, justifiably or not) being hits.

Probably fitting really as I should imagine most of RATM’s audience were rather embarrassing adolescents who as recently as the early 1990s still thought there was something daring about swearing on a record.

I might even have to buy this Joe McElderry thing now…and isn’t that just it though in that far from damaging Simon Cowell’s empire this campaign just gives it even more publicity…

Tom, if you were paying TWO QUID for a pint of snakebite you were going to the wrong discos. deffo shouldn’t be more than a quid fifty, ideally 70p…

If it was genuinely about sticking it to ‘the man’ (i.e. Sony), the alternative would have been to campaign for all the Cowell-haters to illegally download the X-Factor song. But that would have served no benefit whatsoever, in that the X-Factor song would still have got to #1, and Sony’s revenues would have been unaffected. Better yet, try and persuade people who would have bought the song to instead download it illegally.

As for the ‘are Rage any good at all?’ question, you’re all perfectly entitled to your opinion, and I can understand that they are something of a Marmite band, but I happen to think they’re brilliant. ‘The Battle of Los Angeles’ was a phenomenal album, and they were terrific at Leeds and Reading back in 2000, just before they split up. The Generation X anarchist act sometimes seemed a little contrived, but is it any worse a way of selling records than the Cowell method? Are Rage any less entitled to try and spread their political message through music than, say, Billy Bragg?

Also, Tom Morello is one of the Top 5 guitarists of all time. Fact. People should buy this record to honour his talents if nothing else!

I wouldn’t be surprised if Sony were behind the entire campaign, although that is crediting their marketing people with a fair bit of ingenuity. It’s entirely plausible though as not only was last year’s Buckley effort a Sony/Sony thing as someone pointed out earlier, there is plenty of dislike for Syco within Sony – pissing off Cowell and making loads of money in the process. Sounds like a win win.

This whole thing is quite therapeutic actually.

It’d be like an interesting version of the Tory party leadership race.

Finally, they’ll each select their winner and we get to see which audience packs more buying/voting clout for that year, creating a kind of meta-talent contest of it’s very own. IT’LL BE GREAT!!!

One other point though, if this was really supposed to be a reaction against corporate pop, wouldn’t it have made more sense to pick a tune on an independent label. Buh! Better luck next year :D