For most bands in the slumping music industry, the day of big budget videos is a luxury of the past. But last week undisputed kings of the viral music video, OK GO, found a new avenue to make their art a reality: corporate sponsorship.
The band’s clip for “This Too Shall Pass,” which features a mind blowing two story Rube Goldberg contraption, was bank rolled by none other than State Farm Insurance. In a brilliant move, the band also arranged the deal so that State Farm paid for the right to make the YouTube clip embeddable anywhere on the web. The band’s singer Damian Kulash recently wrote a piece for The New York Times questioning EMI’s decision not to allow embedding of YouTube videos and State Farm graciously presented a work around solution.
This is the first example of prominent corporate sponsorship of a major music video that we know of and State Farm’s bet has paid off handsomely– the clip received close to a million views a day in the first week of launch. The video includes a toy car with the State Farm logo as well as a State Farm teddy bear and a closing thank you to the brand for making the video possible.
The deal was put together by the band’s label Capitol, which still maintains ownership of the video. I spoke to the band’s guitarist Andy Ross, who says their experience with State Farm was great. ”They paid for the video without getting in the way,” says Ross. “They had minimal requirements.”
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