The new BTS single is called ‘Permission To Dance’. Short-form video platforms are popular. Dance challenges are popular. Dance challenges on short-form video platforms are popular.
You can see where this is going…
K-pop megastars BTS have avoided the giant here (TikTok) and its serious rival (Triller), as well as swerving the under-the-radar wildcard (Lomotif, now rebranding as LoMo), opting instead to go with Shorts, the 15-second video tool baked inside the YouTube mobile app.
While an act like BTS would, if they had chosen to work with TikTok, had everything thrown at this challenge. One needs only look at what TikTok did recently when it hosted an exclusive live performance of Ed Sheeran’s new single, ‘Bad Habits’. But YouTube has been a huge driver for BTS and a campaign built around Shorts is going to have a huge push on YouTube itself.
On 23rd July, the BTS dance challenge officially launched on Shorts and fans have until 14th August to make their 15-second videos. BTS have promised to spotlight some of their favourite entries during the campaign period in a compilation video.
“The Permission to Dance Challenge is an effort to bring people around the world together to dance along with BTS and inspire them to share their unique Shorts creations with one another,” said YouTube in its blog about it.
Interestingly, entrants were told to mark their video with the hashtag #PermissionToDance which is perfectly understandable, but they were also told to add #Shorts to their uploads. So this is also a brand-building exercise for YouTube and a way to try and get audiences to form habitual behaviour around its short-form video tool rather than any of the other (bigger) ones out there.
Entrants will have had to watch the ‘Permission To Dance’ video multiple times to learn the dance moves they must replicate in their own video – a clear way for the group to quickly rack up views.
Indeed, ‘Permission To Dance’ took just 16 days to roar past 200m views on YouTube – making it, incredibly, the 22nd BTS music video to have 200m+ views on YouTube.
