Taylor Swift released a new album, Midnights, at the end of October. You may have heard of it.
And you possibly saw some of the low-key marketing around it. We are, of course, being enormously facetious. It was everywhere. And it will be everywhere for months to come.
In any campaign that is unapologetic in its ubiquity, the sheer scale of what is happening tends to overshadow the separate marketing components.
She has already created nifty AR lenses for Snapchat, but it was what she was doing on YouTube Shorts that was most interesting.
For the platform, she created the #TSAntiHeroChallenge (‘Anti-Hero’ is track three on the album and so far the biggest streaming hit from it) where fans were asked to submit short-form videos showcasing their “anti-heroic traits”, using the song as the soundtrack.
What exactly are those “anti-heroic traits”? Luckily there was a press release to provide examples.
“An anti-heroic trait could be as simple as always grabbing the last slice of pizza, clapping at the end of movies, always putting your feet on the car dashboard, using the same word to start your daily Wordle, leaving your clean laundry in the basket until the next time you do it, pretending you didn’t already watch the next episode of the series you watch with your pals, or even treating your cat like a human,” it says. “Anything goes!”
(We are not sure these all qualify as “anti-heroic” as some might actually just be straight-up anti-social.)
When Taylor Swift asks fans to do something, they usually do not hold back in terms of the numbers involved and the type of UGC they are being asked to deliver.
To date, over 11k videos have been posted with the relevant #TSAntiHeroChallenge hashtag. That might, when one considers Swift has almost 50m subscribers on her official YouTube channel and her own Short pushing it has had 4m views, seem underwhelming. But it’s worth remembering that YouTube Shorts is still, in comparative terms, new.
It is being pushed via the official ‘Anti-Hero’ video (current views: 55m), but that view-to-creation metric is still very low. It might be acts like Swift who have the power to push Shorts into the mainstream, but this is going to be a slow build rather than an overnight revolution.
