Trends in viral marketing seem to have the lifespan of a fruit fly, even in the higher education sector. It was not long ago that schools in Europe were investing serious time and effort into student-produced lip dubs for recruitment and marketing campaigns. Certainly, some of these videos left much to be desired in terms of quality and innovation and the form quickly became passé as schools failed to come up with ways to make it fresh.
Even worse, some of these videos contained potentially embarrassing blunders, like certain lip dubs where students could be seen holding bottles of alcohol on campus. In Spain, the whiskey brand J&B even sponsored a few dozen student lip dubs, unabashedly pushing their product to the detriment of the institution’s reputation.
We are already seeing the backlash, with videos like BEM’s Not a Lipdub or a Flashmob (Ni lipdub ni flashmob: Le Buzz de BEM) or Audencia’s musical clip, Human Mosaic, below.
Will parodies like Brigham Young’s take on the Old Spice commercials catch on in Europe before they become the next marketing trend to fizzle out?
