Emo rapper Yungblud released his single ‘Parents’ in June 2019 (it is closing in on 80m plays on YouTube and almost 130m plays on Spotify), but it has been given a second life on TikTok. As it was starting to trend again on the platform, he released an instrumental version and invited fans to freestyle a new verse for the song. He sifted through the assorted entries to find a winner who he then got in the studio to record their verse for a new recording of the song. 

That winner was 19-year-old Liverpudlian Chloe Noone. “[H]er verse is singing so passionately about equality for women, it just jumped out to me and especially right now is something people need to hear!” said Yungblud on why he picked her. 

With 3.5m followers on TikTok, the duets request quickly took off and Yungblud posted some of the best ones (cut alongside his reaction as they played) on his profile. He ended up surprise-calling Chloe to tell her she had won. And, of course, videoed the call and posted it on his TikTok profile. 

It is hard, however, to judge the viral impact as the #parents hashtag is quite generic and is applied to all manner of videos. Searching it on TikTok comes with a photo of Yungblud at the top and a description of the duets challenge (so far, so good). There were close to 5bn views and the top videos were all Yungblud-related, yet scrolling down a little shows a multitude of unrelated videos, many of which appear to be TikTokers trying to embarrass their parents. 

The lesson here, of course, is: come up with a unique hashtag when running any sort of social media challenge as measuring its impact becomes the marketing equivalent of asking how long a piece of string is.