Like everyone else on earth, I really liked this TikTok that went around the internet a few weeks ago. It made me emotional!
I’m a sucker for a choir that doesn’t kick in right away (see also), but right now, something about a solo guy performing the sound of togetherness is intense — it’s like the way things are and the way everyone wishes they were, smooshed together. So much yearning, in the form and the content!
This TikTok is a little more complicated than it seems, too. It sent me on a journey reminded me that the lines between art and advertising and TikTok content are all very porous.
My quest began with me, a simple woman, watching the TikkTok and assuming the guy in the video was singing the audio. It was just his voice, digitally quadruplicated, or whatever. Right?
No. The more I watched it, the more I was like, this choir is doing harmonies and stuff above @brandonfoster74’s pay grade. So I started poking around to figure out how he made it. Turns out that the audio was pulled from a 2010 British Puma ad:
A wild thing about advertising is how culturally and temporally specific it is. I’m an American living in 2020, and looking at this British ad from 2010 makes my brain glitch. The what now? Why again? I have read numerous (crowdsourced) explanations of this clip, and still don’t get why it exists.
Here’s a guy on Twitter with some “explanation”:
Great. So apparently the Spurs (short for Tottenham Hotspurs) (did AI generate these proper nouns???) are a soccer team. And there was a soccer game… on Valentine’s Day… and this somehow blossomed out of that.
More details from a blog about advertising called “This Is Not Advertising”:
Puma is running a football-related advertising campaign connecting soccer with romance with “The Hardchorus”. Football players and fans sing love songs like they’d sing them in the stands. “They want to be in your arms. You want to be in the stands. What do you do when Valentines Day falls on game day?”
I don’t totally follow this, either — who is the blog quoting in that ending quote? Is it a Puma tagline? — but it seems like Puma said, “There’s a soccer game on Valentine’s Day. Soccer fans sing a lot in Britain! Let’s insert ourselves ambiguously into this whole dynamic! Shoes will absolutely fly off the shelves.”
Puma was right! Weekly Puma sales doubled after the campaign, ^this blog alleges, though it’s unclear where or for how many weeks.
So to recap: the original TikTok pulled a cover song from a decade-old ad. The original song, which “The Hardchorus” covered, was even older — a Savage Garden hit from 1998 that handled the word “faithful” very differently, lol:
I don’t know exactly why this progression from song to ad to TikTok is interesting to me, but I think it’s just a case study in how art can get repurposed productively….. by marketers……………….. sometimes. Every incarnation of the song is good, and communicates a different flavor of feeling!
I would actually say that the oldest, most “legitimately artistic” version of the song is the worst. Odd, because it has such a passionate title! Truly, madly AND deeply! Those adverbs await a bigtime verb. But then the song is monotonous and droopy. It sounds like a tepid bath and is literally also about taking a bath.
Thank goodness marketers and Brandon spiced the track up. And intriguingly, I have not seen anyone offended by marketers using Savage Garden to sell sneakers, but I have seen this:
Maybe the ad was the song’s perfect form.