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T-Mobile Flash Dance
T-Mobile Flash Dance
Commuters break it down in a London station to promote the telecom firm.
By Bernhard Warner and Matthew Yeomans
Posted Wednesday, February 11, 2009 - 11:55am
YouTube Brand Watch takes you to London, where a flash mob dances in support of better telecommunications. Will it make you more likely to switch to T-Mobile? Vote here.
| Name: | The T-Mobile Dance |
| Stats: | T-Mobile has generated serious buzz in the U.K. for its flash mob-style dance routine staged at a London train station. Since the 2-minute-41-second movie was filmed and posted to YouTube in mid-January, it's already generated 4.8 million viewings. The one we show here is the most popular version: 3.2 million viewings and over 7,000 comments from fans. Perhaps mercifully, there are no video replies as of yet. But a disruptive, knockoff flash-mob event held in the same train station (search "Liverpool St Silent Dance"), now circulating on YouTube, is starting to gain a following. |
| What you see: | We shoot across the pond for this one. Location: London's Liverpool Street Station, 11 a.m. local time on Jan. 15, 2009. Commuters hurry to their platforms, others stare at the departures board when the Isley Brothers' classic "Shout" pipes in. Suddenly, a dance troupe, disguised as commuters, breaks into a two-minute medley routine as Brits look on in puzzlement, initially, then bop along to the music. |
| Takeout/Takeaway: | Could flash mobs be cool again? T-Mobile thinks so, stealing a moment from, oh, 2003. It took very little time for the blogosphere and Twitterverse to discover this video. Over 1,200 bloggers have weighed in so far, mainly to recirculate the video in one of those Have you seen this!?-themed posts. |
| Social Media Effect: | Telecom companies make good use of YouTube. Handset reviews are always popular among the digerati. (For proof, type in "iPhone" or "G1.") But for mobile operators, the ones who send us the bills? Nah, there's usually little love. T-Mobile, though, tries to change that with a clever number that's far too involved to have been pulled off in a 30-second TV spot. |
YouTube BrandWatch is The Big Money's exploration into how the world's best-known businesses, so adept at managing their images offline, are being perceived online, where control is harder to come by. Every week, The Big Money features a corporate-themed video that's had significant viewership on YouTube: some approved, some unapproved, some mashed-up combinations of the two. And we'll ask our readers to vote on how the video affects the brands. We think the responses will surprise you, and provide a window onto what is fast becoming the most important playground for corporate games. (Note: This feature has no official relationship to YouTube or its owner, Google.)
