Nelly

Just saw Nelly perform his new single on the Leno show. Wow! It just goes to show you that he is truly one of the best there is, time and time again. His flow is so smooth, his hooks are so memorable all the time and he doesn’t have use profanity to get his point across. His beats are club joints that get your head bobbing and you start singing the hook. On every one of his songs!

Hot In Here took hip hop to a whole new level. It combined an uptempo, club jam, with that southern rap style that just rides the beat to the fullest. Whether Nelly is dolo or with an entourage like Ashanti and Akon he is by far one of the best hitmakers there is today.

When Nellyville hit the airways back in the 90’s and Country Grammar was riding high on the charts Nelly had brought a new flow to radio. Sisco soon followed and you had a grip of hip hop artists that were really breaking in the clubs more than the street as traditional rappers usually do. It was the fact that these artists were really “hook based” hip hop artists and not just busting lyrics and trying to focus on their 16s.

I am glad he is back, and I’ll be buying his new smash record.

Street Marketing 101

How to get to the hipsters. Thats the question being asked at every major ad agency in the world. How do you get to the most elusive group of highly motivated consumers that cant be pushed, pulled or harnessed by traditional marketing tactics. The answer – Stop trying so hard. 

Thats right. Stop the barrage of bullshit. Most kids are followers, but they dont follow big business. They follow the hip kid. The kid that is their age, that has insight to what is going on in the world, that has friends in other places not just their school, team or neighborhood.  You have to drop little gems that they can find when they are searching for other stuff. Its almost like finding a hidden message or a magic trick. You never really see it coming but when you do figure it out, you want to share it with others.

 

A great street promoter knows whats hot almost instantly. With a record for instance, if you set the groundwork, you can almost chart the course of how the record will evolve. The process of regionalization first emerged in the early days of record promotion. Artists and their managers would get into their cars and drive to a stick. An Antennae. Any antennae that they could find. That was a potential spin. So what they would do is pretty elementary. They would surround the station with promotion, hit the soda shops, highschools, anywhere kids would hang. Same thing today. Except now things happen faster, and there are more things. More ways to gain awareness, more things to present to the audience, more ways to build fans.

As one of the founders of street teams it was essential to connect to the hip kids, the alpha males and females that are on the pulse of whats happening. So how do you get to these kids? Here is a quick list of some tips to get into the in-crowd.

 

1. Go Where They Go – The problem with big business is they think they can steer them in a direction by bombarding them with ads. This barrage of information usually turns kids off. Instead of doing TV ads and spending millions on widespread marketing, NIKE realized that its better to spend money online in microgroups, and thus have diverted the majority of their TV campaigns to the little screen – The Computer. Through groups, meetups and social networking NIKE found that the kids want what they want, If they are into Mountain biking or extreme sports then why not spend money there, instead of widespread blasting during prime time television. Even though they might get a much bigger audience on TV, that does not necessarily mean they will buy the product NIKE is pushing. But if they are marketing a new soccer shoe to a soccer mom website, the buzz will be quicker and much more effective. Soccer moms buy everything to make their babies happy. 

2. Four wall the market with stuff that the kids like. For example, if you are marketing a hip hop project you need to do several things before putting it on the radio.  You need to hit the clubs, the mixers, the chatrooms, the malls, the highschools, the colleges, the lifestyle accounts. Then you need to hit the video outlets, and then radio stations and press outlets. Its a lot of stuff but unless you build a base, the project will be baseless and there wont be anything to support the project from the ground up. This is the fundamental reason that most records do not make it. Mind you the music must be competitive, but it needs all the other stuff to be successful. Throwing dollars at radio has never been the best money spent on a project. Getting kids to talk about a record before the radio stations even have it, now thats money well spent.

3. Create an experience, Captivate the audience – By designing unique and fun ways to communicate to the consumer you can build a relationship, trust and loyalty. The fact that people can participate in games and contests means they will come back in order to play and hopefully win something. This event marketing has been instrumental in building brands for years. The Pepsi / Coke competition and the new Mac / PC campaigns have been some of the most successful campaigns ever. Its much more fun to play than to watch, this holds true in marketing as well. Enlisting brand ambassadors and street team members has been best way to penetrate the college market for years. Students are deciding what they want to do for the rest of their lives in college; becoming a street marketer is their first entry into corporate culture. They get hands on experience and are privy to inside information, corporate philosophy and vision and in some instances the work experience as a street team member is like being an intern, except you are onsite instead of in the office. This hands on, peer to peer interaction and the information gathered, is the most valuable a brand can get.