54 The Best Digital Marketing Campaigns in the World
Target audience
Music lovers across the UK who, like Jon, were sick of manufactured talent
show artists and the massive marketing machine behind them dominating the
British music charts.Action
Jon and Tracy decided to pit the 2009 X Factor winner, nice boy Joe McElderry,
and his début single ‘The Climb’, against hard-core Californian rock band Rage
Against the Machine and their 1992 single ‘Killing In The Name’. They created
a Facebook group called ‘RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS
NO.1’ on 22 November 2009, invited their own Facebook friends to join and
encouraged them to do the same. Jon kept pressing others to join the group
and to promote it to their own online network of contacts using the ‘Share’ facil-
ity on Facebook and Twitter’s ‘Retweet’ option. Dogged persistence paid off.The group went viral across social media channels and grew explosively.
Before long it became a big enough phenomenon to visibly ‘rattle’ Simon
Cowell at an X Factor press conference. Rage Against the Machine heard
about the campaign and threw their weight behind it in a BBC Radio 5 Live
interview alongside Jon, where they performed ‘Killing In The Name’ com-
plete with expletives, despite the BBC’s request that they refrain.The campaign took on a life of its own, and became headline news across the
UK and further afield, crossing the boundaries between digital and traditional
media. Big name UK celebrities such as Lenny Henry, Stereophonics, Stephen
Fry, Bill Bailey, Phil Jupitus, Prodigy, John Lydon (Sex Pistols), Dave Grohl and
Sir Paul McCartney all chimed in with their support, lending even more weight
to a juggernaut that had grown at this stage to be every bit as unstoppable as
the X Factor marketing machine. They were on a collision course.