Daft Punk and the smartest campaign in pop this year

[Cupe]

There’s another couple of weeks to go until Daft Punk release their new album “Random Access Memories”, but you know they’ve already aced the campaign of the year. What the French duo and their team did with “Get Lucky” over the last couple of weeks was a masterclass in creating marketing tease, manipulating a buzz and then actually delivering a whopper. Every step of the process was perfectly finetuned and calibrated. Not only do Daft Punk know what their audience want, but they also knew they’d a tune to justify such a silky, immersive campaign.

That’s the thing about “Get Lucky”: you just can’t stop playing the damn thing. It doesn’t matter if you come up with the best marketing push of all time unless you have something to ack it up. Once “Get Lucky” stops, you want to put it back on again. When was the last time a tune you heard pumping from the radio made you want to do that? You certainly wouldn’t do it with Passenger, for instance, another awful singer-songwriter that Irish radio audiences have taken to their heart. But we digress and that discussion about Irish radio’s penchant for the same old same old versus cutting-edge pop is for another day.

Back to “Get Lucky”. It puts Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers in the same frame and makes perfect use of their talents. A decade ago, Williams and his Neptunes’ buddy Chad Hugo produced 43 per cent of the tunes played on US radio. Rodgers, as we know all too well from his biography and interviews, was king of the funky pop tune, a producer and guitarist with the golden touch. Put ‘em into the mix with Daft Punk’s elan and you’ve a masterplan. When Rodgers talked about working with Daft Punk at Banter last summer, he was genuinely excited and you can now understand why. This was a bit of a gamechanger for him and all involved. But this wasn’t about getting lucky, this really was “Get Lucky”. You should be dancing? Oh yes.

What the tune also does is perfectly tees up expectations for the album. Let’s be honest, we really hope in our heart of hearts that Daft Punk are returning to the blue streak with albums that they had with “Homework” or “Discovery” all those years ago. We don’t want another “Human After All”. We want “Random Access Memories” to bring us back to the good old days, to turn a new generation of pop and club kids onto Daft Punk’s chic. We’re buzzing about “Get Lucky”, but we have our fingers cross for “Random Access Memories”. A sublime pop single is one thing, but an album which matches that velocity is something else entirely.

It will be interesting too if the smart campaign also extends to how the band push the album. Album campaigns are all about the hard sell, all about being in your face whether you want the damn thing to be in your face or not. We can take it that Daft Punk won’t be doing phone interviews with everyone who wants one and there seems to be little sign of a tour (well, unless you want to get to Wee Waa) so how this goes is down to how the album is positioned and, most important of all, how it sounds. An album chockablock with instant smash hits like “Get Lucky” would be quite the thing. From irishtimes.com

[Cupe]

lol at Pop

[russell]

this WHALE needs to get on that Boards of Canada album promo.

obviously BoC aint pop, far from it, but it's a proper teasing way to release some shit.

[eggssell]

its hard to say they don't do pop? not saying its bad (which i ahve no idea why people insist popular means bad)

in early 90's their sound was very much like the sound of that time, and dance was very pop at that time (when your sound is played on sitcoms and advertisements it has become pop)

you couldnt turn on rage without seeing da funk (or whatever the track had the dogg face dude in it). i swear every farken time, whether i was coming home from the club; turning on the telly to study late at night; getting up in the morn to watch music vids it seemed to be the one playing!

and one more time! not only was that popular it is for all intents and purposes a dance pop track. that too was sooo played out, you were almost left saying "i swear to god one more time... ".

its lucky i dont listen to radio no more

[Robbo123]

up all night to gett lucckyy..weooooeeoooww

[GREMM1S]

The masters at building up hype, which i have real worries may actually shoot themselves in the foot if the album doesn't musically deliver.

Always going to be hard whether people froth over the album because it's Daft Punk or because the tracks are actually good.

I'm not a fan of get lucky at all tbh, by no means a terrible track but really feels have done to me, was hoping for a bit more from DP.

[overit]

1st read I thought that ^^^^^ was a journalism assignment you'd shared boss.

My 2c:

The album will be released heavily and fill all our minds for a while, but then it will be continuously and subliminally promoted by gradually licensing tracks as backing for other products campaigns.

In ten years we will be dissing Daft Punk as the U2 of dance.