Bob Dylan plugs latest set with "Homesick" message
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Bob Dylan is back "on the pavement, thinkin' about the government," and he has a special message for you.
Dylan's Columbia Records label is promoting his upcoming greatest-hits collection with an Internet chain letter that mixes personalized greetings delivered by the rock bard with links to his Web site and an online purchase form.
The viral marketing campaign features a clip from the famed "Subterranean Homesick Blues" music video showing a young Dylan standing in an alley as he flips through cue cards printed with selected words from the song's lyrics (www.dylanmessaging.com/watch).
In the version circulating on the Internet, recipients can put their own words on the cue cards and ship the altered video back to the sender or other people. It also contains links to the official album Web site, www.dylan07.com, and various online promotional materials.
The black-and-white video sequence is sent to e-mail in-boxes with the introduction, "Bob Dylan has a message for you" printed in the subject line.
Some marketing analysts hailed the Dylan e-card as a novel innovation likely to catch on with young music fans. Others were left scratching their heads.
Noted rock critic Dave Marsh said he was "bemused" by the concept, although he wondered how it would translate into album sales, and whether it might tarnish Dylan's stature.
"They should be trying to make Bob Dylan more essential, but instead they're making him part of a scheme," Marsh said. "If it's really true that this is the new way to sell records, I wonder why the first one is Bob Dylan instead of Britney Spears."
BACK ON THE PAVEMENT
Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" -- with the opening line, "Johnny's in the basement mixing up the medicine/I'm on the pavement thinkin' about the government" -- was first released on his 1965 album "Bringing It All Back Home."
The accompanying cue-card sequence, a forerunner of music videos popularized on MTV a generation later, originally ran as the opening segment of D.A. Pennebaker's documentary film "Don't Look Back," about Dylan's first tour of England.
It was shot in an alley behind the Savoy Hotel in London with poet Allen Ginsberg and singer-songwriter Bob Neuwirth in the background.
The e-mail is aimed mostly at young potential Dylan fans accustomed to text-messaging and finding music online, said Charlie Stanford, a marketing executive at Columbia's Sony BMG parent, who came up with the idea.
"We wanted to try to connect with the younger demographic," Stanford said on Wednesday from his home in Britain.
Stanford said the campaign has exceeded his expectations; more than 81,000 new cue-card messages have been created and sent since the promotion was launched three weeks ago.
"I think the fact that so many people interacted with it is great," said Emily Riley, an analyst for Jupiter Research, adding that viewers' ability to compose text in the video makes it unique as a piece of viral marketing -- so called for its self-perpetuating design.
Word-of-mouth promotional campaigns have been around a long time. But using the Web to leverage such awareness has exploded since social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook became popular in the past couple of years, she said.
Whether caused by the cue-card campaign, online interest in Dylan has spiked, as measured by a three-fold increase in Internet searches for his name over the past week, according to Bill Tancer of the online market research firm Hitwise.
The new "Dylan" collection, a single-CD version with 18 songs, and a three-disc set with 51 tracks, is due out October 2 in North America, and a day earlier internationally.
(Editing by Dean Goodman/Brian Moss)
Reuters/Nielsen
