Remember the good old days, getting home from school and eagerly starting up the old pc, enduring the grunts and clicks of your 56k dial-up modem so you could spend 3 hours watching the progress bar on Napster slowly fill as you downloaded the latest piece of crap from the charts? It’s funny to think that, with the industry having come so far since then, the infamous original illegal p2p engine is still chugging away (though admittedly a reformed character - think ‘marky mark’).
However, as we all know it’s a different game now, a young man’s game, with such whippersnappers as iTunes, Nokia, last.fm and the aforementioned Spotify reaping the spoils. So what to do?
Napster (with the aid of Modernista) have avoided the bubbly ‘web 2.0′ style of their young rivals, instead choosing not to forget their roots with a campaign of what looks like grainy 70’s psychadelica mixed with some funny nostalgic copy. aimed straight at the now 16-30 generation who grew up on their slow download speeds, intermittent cutouts, high probability of the end file being porn and sweet victory when it was wasn’t.
As Mother did for Pot Noodle, (IMO) this demonstrates a degree of brand-awareness that is often lacking in the advertising world. For this, both Napster and Modernista should be applauded.*
Here is the link to all the idents that accompany this print campaign. They remind me slightly of the ‘Dharma Initiative’ from Lost.
*It’s ok, you can do it in your mind.
