Tagging

So I got an email tonight from Timothy Blevins, a copywriter at Minneapolis agency Colle + McVoy, pointing me to a very cool site he and his agency had done for a local hip-hop band called Atmosphere to promote their album When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold.

The site, called paintthatshitgold.com, is very nicely done and well worth a visit. It essentially lets you "tag" (e.g. "spray paint upon," for those of you not up on your urban slang) any other site on the web. (What you see above is Tim's expertly done desecration of The Toad Stool.) The site is very robust and lets you do all sorts of cool things like use stencils and adjust the size of the paint can nozzle. It's fun without getting in the way of itself, which is often an issue with these sorts of sites.

Now as I'd pointed out in Your Brand Is Not My Friend™, music acts like Atmosphere (along with movies, TV shows and sports teams) are almost always Prom King Brands. In other words, there's an associated coolness factor that comes with them. They have fans, not customers. And their fans want to be their friend.

So that this very same site, if it had come from, say, Sunny Delight Fruit Drinks would lose all credibility and become just another lame "Clicking Through The Internet" web site. Because you need that Prom King cred, that coolness factor for a site like this to work. Otherwise it's just another ad agency microsite trying to get me to do something that's completely out of character for the brand. Kind of like a mom in a mini-skirt.

Maybe the thing to do is to find some of those completely out of character sites and tag them. Send the results to me and I'll post them.