For those of you who aren’t familiar, Marié Digby is a YouTube star along the lines of Tay Zonday. Essentially a seemingly “undiscovered talent” that just sits in their living room or makeshift studio and shyly puts themselves out there for the YouTube audience. In the case of Marié, it seems talent was the selling point – in the case of Zonday, it was simply ridiculous (give Chocolate Rain a listen…) And we, as the YouTube audience, love to come across something novel, funny, or what we truly believe to be an undiscovered talent.
So you can imagine the disbelief and disappointment felt by some when it was discovered that Marié was actually an artist signed and coached by Hollywood Records (a division of the Walt Disney Company). According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Digby was signed in 2005 and her “self propelled” YouTube career was actually very carefully designed and implemented by her record label. Her orchestrated MySpace and YouTube campaign was quite well done, and she’s approaching 10,000 friends on MySpace and has 11,000+ subscribers to her YouTube channel. Assuming some overlap, that’s at least 10,000 – maybe as many as 20,000 – interested people who’ve seen the huge banner linking to her iTunes album – targeted advertising that is very difficult to come by and one of the reasons internet advertising is so successful.
Personally? I can understand how some people feel this is underhanded, but I’ve not trusted much of what I see on the internet at face value for some time now. On the flip side, if I were a record label, this seems like an incredibly inexpensive way to get exposure for your artists. All you need is a webcam, some talent, and a little internet savvy and you’ve got yourself a captive and loyal YouTube following, which at the end of the day may be better than the limited (but expensive) exposure you would get via the normal avenues of trying to get your single played on the radio. The one truly deceptive thing I do see here is that Hollywood Records announced last week that “Breakthrough YouTube Phenomenon Marié Digby Signs With Hollywood Records.” It’s a somewhat ambiguous lie, but a lie nonetheless. At the end of the day, say what we will, this is a big “Mission Accomplished” for Marié Digby and Hollywood Records – because not only do we know who she is, but we are talking about her.
The Wall Street Journal sums it up best (as per usual):
What her legions of fans don’t realize, however, is that Ms. Digby’s career demonstrates something else: that traditional media conglomerates are going to new lengths to take advantage of the Internet’s ability to generate word-of-mouth buzz.
Word of mouth – simple as can be – is one of the most powerful ways to create excitement for a product (lets face it: Marié was a person in 2005, what we see of her now is very much a “product”) and the bottom line is that the internet is the most efficient way to initiate and perpetuate word of mouth marketing.
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