Ding Dong

According to the Top 100 Hits app on my phone the number one song in the UK today is `Ding Dong the witch is dead.’ from The Wizard of Oz. It’s a less than subtle show of power by those in Britain who are rejoicing in the death of Margaret Thatcher with a social campaign to cause maximum embarrassment to conservatives everywhere. The pop music charts are played every week by the BBC and this guerilla campaign leaves them with the choice of either playing the song and adding to its social impact or choosing not to play it and adding even more to its social impact. It’s brilliant. Thatcher would have thought it childish and petty which it is but that’s beside the point. It works because it has a very British sense of irreverence and refusal to be mature that is the hallmark of the British character. We are all school children at heart laughing at fart jokes. Some stiff upper lip types exist of course and they will be tut-tutting about it even as they slip into their talcum-powdered leather bondage suits and bend over for a good spanking from Mistress Cruella deLite. It is a display of people power over authority that worries people. I saw glimpses of it here in the US when viewers began seeing through the fakery of shows like American Idol and started voting for most talent less people just to mess with the producers. In the end it never amounted to anything because it wasn’t anything anyone could really care less about. Ding Dong is a simple piece of civil disobedience to tweak the noses of those who run the country and that are what keeps it fuelled. When I look at commercial social campaigns touted as game changing I find the majority of them not game changing at all because they lack that `fuelled by fury’ power that drives the Death parties for Thatcher. The real trick, and trick it is, would be to have a social campaign give people an outlet for their frustrations, a vent for their anger allowing them to make a point that other media denies them. And it should be funny in a satirical way. I don’t know if America appreciates satire the way the UK does. Satire is how the public reprimands those in power for getting too big for their boots. It works that way in France also. But in the US satire is more about intellectuals sharing jokes with fellow intellectuals. In Britain there was a show called Spitting Image, which featured grossly caricatured puppets of famous politicians and celebrities, and scripts that poked merciless fun at everyone in the public eye. It was how the commoner could laugh at his or her betters –to put it in a Downton Abbey context. Satire here is a show of slick intelligence by East and West coast intellectuals for East and West coast intellectuals. A true social phenomenon like Ding Dong would never emerge in this environment. Ding Dong is far too lowbrow. Like Harlem Shake and look what happened with that. The civil disobedience aspect of that was stomped on. Kids were banned from doing it in school halls and firemen were reprimanded for doing it in fire stations, which shows how wary the authorities are of ground up movements. Ding Dong is essentially a point of social focus. Can there be such a thing as a benign point of social focus encouraging an outpouring of emotion which a brand can ignite,take credit for or otherwise benefit from?

I believe that is the real challenge. Instead of brands telling me what to do I want to use brands to inform the world about what I want to do. Brands that don’t let me do that are dead to me.

Ding Dong.