Rick Astley Recreates His Iconic Music Video for CSAA

Rick Astley is reprising the classic 1987 music video that has provided fodder for more than a decade's worth of memes as part of a new campaign for insurance brand American Automobile Association (AAA) and its affiliate California State Automobile Association (CSAA). The British singer appeared in a new 35th anniversary version of the "Never Gonna Give You Up" video that features back-up dancers clad in AAA uniforms and backdrops branded with the roadside insurer's logo. In a play on the famous bait-and-switch internet prank based around the song known as Rickrolling, the brand and the agency behind the campaign, Deloitte Digital, will spread the video through QR codes and shortened links scattered across billboards, outdoor digital displays, TV commercials and even in skywriting. The out-of-home ads are meant to grab the attention of passersby with displays in the shape of Astley's signature hairdo, enticing them to follow the QR code or short link and view the video for themselves. Rick Astley, Now a TikTok Star, Isn’t Sure He Could Have Broken Out in 2020 Deloitte Digital U.S. co-head of creative, brand and advertising Milton Correa said the creative team was originally attracted to the opportunity to connect CSAA with a pop classic on a significant anniversary, but the longstanding meme provided an added bonus as a fun way to distribute the media. "The fact is that it's an internet treasure and a pop culture treasure," Correa said. "The meme is so ubiquitous and prevalent. It also added a new layer to how we can communicate this campaign, which was the interactivity and the experience of it." https://vimeo.com/740068687 QR codes have made a comeback as an advertising tool during the pandemic, as restaurant menus and in-store ads have made viewing them second nature to most consumers. That habit has made it a ripe new medium and tool for creatives to explore, perhaps the most famous example being Coinbase's enigmatic Super Bowl commercial earlier this year. While Deloitte Digital didn't set out to make a QR code campaign specifically, the newfound popularity of the codes made it a natural choice to best funnel consumers into following an unknown link, therefore adding the necessary element of surprise, according to Jones Krahl, U.S. co-head of creative, brand and advertising at Deloitte Digital. "The idea was never like, this is a QR code campaign, and we weren't necessarily planning to use the QR code," Krahl said. "But after we had the idea of using Rick Astley, as an evolution of the campaign, we thought, 'How can we make this more than just the spot, more than just the music video—make it an experience?'" The AAA has been attempting to make inroads with a younger audience for the last few years, significantly ramping up its digital advertising budget. Deloitte Digital saw the campaign as a way to cleverly bridge traditional advertising channels with a digital counterpart. Correa said the campaign was also based on internal research that showed that while people tend to think negatively of the insurance industry overall, they have positive feelings about the AAA, a sentiment the creatives sought to capture and extend with a light, joyful song. "We feel like this campaign, the way it's coming across and the way people are receiving it, is all the positivity online," Correa said. "People are organically distributing it online. I mean, there's a lot of remixes, people comparing it to the original video, it's being repurposed on TikTok everywhere. It's creating this overall good feeling." How Coinbase Broke the Offline-to-Online Marketing Paradigm