Commentary

Mumm Tries A Video Campaign That Has You Seeing Double

David Guetta is a French-born club DJ, producer and electro music maker who is very, very popular and who, for example, is the second-most streamed artist on Spotify, behind only One Direction. His current hit “Dangerous” is on Spotify’s top 10 globally and in the United Kingdom. As of this moment, 16.2 million people follow him on Twitter. 

Yesterday on Facebook, he asked his followers there: “Have you ever sprayed Champagne G.H.MUMM from one screen to another ? Try it now on: http://bit.ly/doublescreen #DareWinCelebrate

So, go ahead, try it, or I’ll try to explain: When you watch it on YouTube, you are invited to put your smartphone next to the screen (there’s a little diagram for dull-witted people like me) and punch in a code. Within seconds, you are watching a kind of enhanced version of “Dangerous,” a music video about a big car race, featuring cool Euro-characters and fast cars and curvy--very curvy, and slo-mo sexy--young women who serve as the pit crew. The whole scene, or parts of it, travels from smartphone to laptop or tablet, like stereo sound goes from speaker to speaker. It’s interesting.

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It’s not so easy to explain, which, I think, might be one of its problems.

Or not. The first so-called Double Screen video doesn’t leave every user wondering, like it at first did for me. Since the end of October, 27 million people have seen this YouTube video all by itself (it works that way), and about 1.2 million of them hooked it up with the Double Screen experience.

The company that is behind the advertising campaign, and represents Guetta in this commercial endeavor, is the French-based My Love Affair, which similarly represents other talent who want to do advertising or marketing deals that aren’t, they feel, artistically void. Mumm champagne gets featured at the end, when everybody pops corks around the winners, and in proximity to the sexy girls, and out it oozes in a bubbly froth that drips down the bottle.

I’m going to take a wild guess here, but I think Mumm is making an allusion to something that isn’t just about champagne at this point. But it doesn’t seem like a Mumm commercial start-to-finish.

My Love Affair integrates artist with client in other ways. Its Live@Home presents artist in front of very small audiences, and puts together a 26-minute video on a dedicated site. Guetta may not be a really familiar name to you (he isn’t to me) but artists like Justin Bieber, Will. I. Am, Lenny Kravitz, Alicia Keys and Usher certainly are. So are clients like Hewitt Packard, McDonald’s, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and others.

Renaud Skalli, the head of artists and label relations and My Love Affair’s man in the United States, where the 3-year-old company is brand new, is naturally excited about the business, and to him, the Mumm campaign is a lot of good ideas all rolled into one. 

For openers, the champagne-swilling crowd is comparatively old, Skalli tells me, so with this first-of-its-kind campaign, Mumm hopes to interest drinkers who are club-hopping, smartphone-using and social-media drenched. Many of them are young drinkers. You’d have to say “Dangerous” begins to check off all of those boxes and more. The Double Screen thing says engagement with a capital E, and that more than a million of them have done it shows a good grab of early (and eager) adopters. (It’s also a pretty cool way to command two screens at one time.)

All that said to me is far more than I’d ever do, but as I learn daily, most of the world’s marketers are not at all interested in me. Mumm is setting itself up as special and happening. That can’t be bad for a champagne brand.

And Skalli points out, for Guetta, the Mumm involvement doesn’t go over a line that’s important to him. Though he’s a club kind of guy Guetta doesn’t drink hard liquor -- but he does drink champagne.


pj@mediapost.com
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