• by August 15, 2005

SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW, SOMETHING BORROWED, A LITTLE CREDIT LONG OVERDUE -- Last week, ad agency BBDO Detroit and TV jingle producer JSM Music announced they have teamed up for what appears to be an industry first: the simultaneous release of a mainstream retail record and a commercial music video. No, not the simultaneous release of a record and a music video. That's been done before. The fact that they are being jointly produced by an ad shop and a jingle house. Their new creation - the rock/hip-hop single "Unleashed," and its accompanying music video will be released in September, a month before the full-length album. The song is a mash-up of Nazareth's 70's smash "Hair of the Dog" and JSM recording artist Chris Classic's own track "Live and Loose." A mash-up, we're told, is the modern day equivalent of sampling. Sampling, we're told, is when one recording artist "borrows" music, or elements of music from another recording artist and combines it with other recordings yielding something new.

So what's the Madison Avenue connection? Well, the mash-up actually received its first exposure as the music for BBDO's national TV ad campaign for the DaimlerChrysler's Dodge Charger. This does indeed appear to be something new. Usually Madison Avenue waits for something to become popular before ripping it off. In this case, it has ripped something off that was itself a rip-off of something that once was popular. It's also becoming popular again, in its own revisionist sort of way. It seems the Madison Avenue's Motown outpost whet listener appetites for mo' of the mash-up.

After receiving thousands of inquiries about the music from the national TV spot, JSM and BBDO conspired to release both the single and a full-length CD and music video featuring artist Chris Classic.

"This has never been done before," JSM Music President-CEO Joel Simon, said referring to the JSM/BBDO collaboration, which ironically is based on something pretty old.

But we have to wonder how new the concept really is. Okay, so mash-ups didn't exist back then, but we can recall another ad agency getting into the music video business back when music videos really were something new. It was the mid-1980s, not long after the launch of MTV. The agency was Doyle Dane Bernbach and it was created in a time when ad agencies still had names, not initials. They also had media departments. The idea for getting into the music video business came from the department's new media guru, Jay James, a protégé of wunderkind media director Mike Drexler, now media chief at Optimedia.

DDB's stint in the music business didn't last long, but long enough to create an award-winning video for the Alan Parsons Project, a virtual band that itself was ahead of the digital recording revolution. It's hard to say what James might have tackled next before he passed away a few short years later, still in his 30s, but we think it would have been something far more original than a mash-up.

LOCO MOTIVES -- We were on the 6:04 to New Haven when all sorts of mayhem broke lose. The 6:04, we should explain, is our favorite train to catch on our way home from Grand Central Station, because it let's us work late enough in the office that nobody looks askance when we dash out the door, but it gets us home early enough to have dinner with our family. The problem is it also tends to be a favorite of a lot of other Connecticut-bound commuters, making it one of the most crowded trains operated by Metro North.

Normally, there's good reason for the crowd, but on this evening somewhere north of New York but south of Stamford, CT, the train stalled. Over the P.A., the conductor announced there was a "circuit down ahead of us," and that we would need to back up turnaround and head back north on another track. Sounded reasonable enough, but then why weren't we moving. Why were we jerking a little bit north, then back south, then back north again? Disconcerting to say the least, especially with New York on high alert and the NYPD randomly inspecting commuters' parcels and luggage.

As it turns out this was no act of terrorism. Our conductor was simply having communication problems with his cell phone. And that, in turn, contributed to a brand communication problem for his cell phone service provider.

"Unfortunately I have Verizon," he announced to the train full of frustrated commuters. "It doesn't work."

Had we been within earshot of the P.A. system, we would have shared that Sprint PCS also doesn't work.