The PussyCat Dolls have a new song called, “Hush, Hush” and of course all the kids are crazy over it. But what drove us crazy was the confluence of terribly placed products in the music video, including Campari, a Nokia cell phone, an HP laptop and oh, Perez Hilton.
Just a day after being published on YouTube, the video above has more than 80k views — which is precisely what the above mentioned brands wanted. But let’s break down the placements and why it’s a perfect storm for marketers, despite looking really bad.
The video consists of a few different scenes, all of which include mostly-naked PussyCat Dolls and then some kind of product. The least annoying of those was Nokia’s. At 30 seconds in, we see a bathing pussycat looking at her phone and it’s barely noticeable that it’s even Nokia. Fine.
A 1:37, an HP notebook enters the scene. It’s carried through “the club” by some random faceless dancing extra who delivers it to the DJ, who immediately opens up the pink-flowered laptop and begins futzing with it. C’mon dude, you’ve got spinning to do! A better execution might have been a passover of some random chick who is sitting in the club in sweats and a high school running t-shirt — playing on the laptop. She thought this was a Starbucks, but it turned out to be an annoying club — and now her daily blog post will have to wait.
At 1:52 we see flashes of Campari — bottles, labeled glasses and even the booze itself, all brown and tasty looking. But where’s the Jack, Bud Light and obligatory “soda”? Alas, this isn’t a real club, it’s one paid for by pretentious liquor and out-of-place computers.
The final installment of the strange placements, and arguably the most important one, is none other than Perez Hilton himself. He’s hard to spot at first, but can be spotted at 2:26 wearing a t-shirt that reads, “Hush Hush Featuring Perez.” Might not seem like a big deal except that, of course, Perez posted the video right there on his site. And in a day it’s garnered some 80 thousand views.
As bad as all these placements are (well, excluding Nokia), the whole thing is packaging genius. Who knows if Perez was paid for his time on this (though I’d bet he was), but his site was the launch vehicle for the video and that alone was probably enough to get Campari, HP and Nokia salivating at the opportunity to throw their products into the mix — no matter how out of place they seem.
Update: A friend notes that the laptop/DJ scenario really makes no sense because the DJ is already spinning. So what, is he checking his e-mail?
More images after the jump.
More: “Why Advertising on Perez Hilton Beats the Hell Outta TV”