Viral Marketing At Its Best

In a small, rural village near Malaga a huge viral marketing success came about. Jesús Rodríguez is the lead singer of a "Rustic Rock Band" called El Koala and who's mainly being doing gigs in and around Malaga (much of it for the past 20 years). He tried, without success, to get one of the record labels in Madrid to sign him up but they weren't really interested in a guy whose music and lyrics is firmly routed in the country.

Well, it looks like he's going to have the last laugh as his song, 'Opá, yo viacé un corrá' (literally Dad, I'm going to build a farm), is in all the record shops, is likely to be the hit of summer and he is the new rock celebrity, being invited onto all the major TV shows. What's also interesting is that the song is not song even in Castellano but in the dialect of his region.

And all this success can be attributed to a simple video clip that he made over 3 afternoons at his friends' farm. The clip was uploaded to the Internet (you can find it on You Tube and Google Video)  and traffic was generated through emails and people blogging about it.

The current number of downloads for the song is over 3 million and people are even starting to make their own video versions of it. And what's more - this song is likely to run and run for the next few months as we head into summer. I have even come across a website where the lyrics are tranlsated into Shakespearean and Rap English and a version of it with George Bush puppits (and telling his dad he's going to invade Iraq!).