Passionland

Today I went to dinner with some friends after having a late lunch meeting (yes it’s Sunday and should be sabbath). One of my friend which is a very talented fashion editor at Bazaar and also a regular reader of this blog asked, why this blog has gone silence this past two weeks. Well if you’re having the same thought, the reason is we’re dead busy, classique answer. Yup, dead busy but for me personally it’s exciting. Ok, so here goes my first post in 2008.

One of our neighbor country has done a very effective TVC for one of its destination city, well at least I and some people on the net are captured. I’m quite sure that this campaign will be buzzed around in the upcoming month. It’s Korea for Hi Seoul TVC. I first saw this campaign earlier this month on MTV, but I think this is a campaign for 2007.
The commercial is so MTV style, and I guess they really wanted to target this MTV generation. There are two smart elements that makes this ad grabs my attention. First off is the intro, where a dog asked to a really boring girl whether she recently saw a talking dog, and the girl was so damn bored that she just point out a direction to her left with her blank eyes stare with no excitement nor surprised that she just met one. Then come the second part which pretty much standard beauty shot of night life in the city. It’s not the visual that captured my attention and I’m not saying that the visual is bad at all, but what makes this ad get buzzed is the soundtrack. The music is very catchy chillin’ up tempo beat, simple lyric and very easy to remember. So the next action for me was open up my laptop went to Google and start throwing keywords into the magic box.

And here comes the buzz. This quest started to become exciting when I found out that there are many people are also looking for this, asked this in Yahoo!Answers and blog this and you can’t find the good quality video of this ad anywhere on the net (at least until yesterday I couldn’t find one), but instead you’ll find this video getting taped by a cellphone stratight form the TV and someone has put this up in Youtube.
You might say only 400 plus peeps watched this, but if you look the bigger picture, I’m pretty sure first keyword to be used to search this ad is “Hi Seoul” which will return very relevant result about the campaign both in Google and Youtube, the product they intended to sell, Hi Seoul Festival. I’m pretty sure that people will browse through several of websites and view some of the video in Youtube.

I personally think that they has also made a good pick on the artist for their soundtrack. This lesser known artist are Aaron Wheeler and Jayme Tovey, surprisingly both are not Korean and it’s not easy to find this names, also the only official place you could find the info about them is in their unmaintained Myspace. May be this is a bad move, but for me and some people this facts adds up our curiosity and start digging more about them. My journey stops after 45 minutes Googling and found this guy blog. His blog got many new visitor from people with the same interest. This guy somehow got the full length mp3 and put a link so that everyone can download it. If you’ve been looking for this song like I am, you can visit the blog and find the download link there. The fact that the mp3 is low quality (96 Kbps), makes me still searching for high quality version, but I couldn’t find any, so if you have a link or have the mp3, please share :P

My conclusion, this is an effective ad for the audience like me (MTV generation). The fact that they didn’t put any link at all in their TVC is very thoughtful I would say, this makes the effort of searching for the song become an experience, the fact that you end up to an official website and didn’t find what you’re looking for is a journey, and when you finally found the song is rewarding. This whole package makes you want to share this voluntarily like what I just did right now, darn!! But it’s really worth sharing tho… Hope you guys enjoy the song, it’s been resonated over and over in my play list, I’ll be sure to play this in the office tomorrow. The song title is “Moonlight” by the way, and here’s the lyrics if you wanted to sing along.

In the moonlight
(Gonna make you feel right, gonna get it right tonight)

In the moonlight, you can feel that feeling so right,
Cause you know it`s happened tonight,
and the stars are shining so bright,
You know it`s real.

I don’t know whether you share the same experience as I do, please share your thought about this. I personally think that this will really works for the generation C (the internet savvy generation), I really like the experience of search and finally found what I was looking for, it’s like small achievement, and it’s kinda short term rewarding.