Abercrombie & Fitch - What Does The Fox Say?

A few summers ago Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Call Me Maybe' was the hit of the summer.  The song began trending in large part because Justin Bieber uploaded a video of him lip syncing to the song.  That kicked off a trend of thousands of people creating 'Call Me Maybe' lip sync videos with everyone from the Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders to Jimmy Fallon getting in on the act.  Several brands also created their own, with Abercrombie & Fitch creating the most popular branded version.  The video (20 million views to date) featured various half-naked Abercrombie models from cities around the world.  Eight months later, Abercrombie decided to also jump on board the Harlem Shake meme and create an Abercrombie & Fitch Harlem Shake video, though they were a bit late to the game and the video only garned 200k views.

Memejacking now seems to be a bona fide part of their content strategy as they've also jumped on the What Does The Fox Say? trend by creating their own version of the song featuring Abercrombie models.  It's a smart strategy as they can pretty much guarantee an audience by piggybacking on whatever is trending and inserting half-naked models into the equation.



Posted by: Reuben Halper

Two Attempts To Stop The Harlem Shake - W+K NY & Freddie Wong

I've never seen a meme explode so quickly as the Harlem Shake craze (there's currently 4,000 harlem shake videos per day being uploaded).  If you want background on the phenomenon, check out this YouTube trends blog post.  At the same time, I've never seen a meme become so immediately and thoroughly tiresome.  When the anchors of the Today show are doing it, you know that it's time to take it out behind the barn and put it down for good.  Thankfully, people more talented than I are doing their part in putting an official end to this phenomenon.

First up YouTube star Freddie Wong:


And the good people at Wieden + Kennedy New York bringing an old meme into the mix:
And finally, the guys at Vice have a good write up about why the Harlem Shake as currently imagined is but a shell of it's former self and generally sucks.

Gotye - Somebodies: A YouTube Orchestra

Gotye's song 'Somebody That I Used To Know' seemingly took over the world and the Internet awhile back.  Besides being played everywhere that had a set of speakers, it also resulted in an innumerable amount of interpretations and cover videos (just search on YouTube for 'Somebody that I used to know.').  In a very meta moment, Gotye has created their own mashup of all the fan-made cover versions to produce 'Sombodies: A YouTube Orchestra.'  As Gotye says: 'Reluctant as I am to add to the mountain of interpretations of Somebody That I Used To Know seemingly taking over their own area of the internet, I couldn't resist the massive remixability that such a large, varied yet connected bundle of source material offered.

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It's almost like a snake eating it's own tail...an internet meme that's turned inward to devour itself.  Bizarre.  This was directly inspired by the one of the founding fathers of the video mashup, Kutiman and his iconic 'Thru-You' project.  Somebodies is a beautifully done piece of video and a nice way to highlights the breadth of creativity from both Gotye and the various fans who took the time to create their own versions of the song.  Check it out below (and apologies for resurfacing a song that's likely been stuck in your head and heard thousands of times already in the past year).