Some people release videos to promote their music, but Ok Go seem to release music to help them promote their film-making talent.  This is their second video for This Too Shall Pass and it speaks for itself really: mental genius.

Apparently this took them four months to build, and honestly, I don’t even care if they cheated a bit (how did they do that going through the hole bit about 3/4 of the way through?) or if it really is as clever as it looks, it’s so visually engaging I am going to love it anway.

Terms like ‘viral marketing’ really were invented for people like this, and of course it sums up the fundamental misconception a lot of people have about viral marketing.  I get emails from fuckwits all the time saying ‘have you seen the latest ‘viral’ by suchandsuchatalentlessfuckwit?’  And of course, that’s just not how it works.  You can’t designate something viral status, and lo and behold – poof! – it is then a viral video.  Viral is a description of how something spreads, and if it’s shit and doesn’t go anywhere then it isn’t viral, no matter how cool your haircut is or how hard you try.

It’s like respect – the description of something as viral is not something you can demand, it’s something which must be earned.

Now I don’t want you to start thinking I want to get into the habit of just randomly throwing up videos here and there without a shred of thought, but I have to confess that the new video from Ok Go tickled me.

I am an industrial designer at Proper Job, and this is probably too geeky to admit, but the combination of that rich purple and the muddy greens of the undergrowth really is nicely judged.  Sorry, I know you don’t care about that in the slightest, but there you go, I’ve said it now.

Ok Go, of course, are the chaps who did that genius treadmill video a little while back, and this may not be quite that inventive, but it’s still really nicely done.  There’s a danger, I suppose, that when you gain a reputation for making clever videos that people let it overshadow the tunes a little, and I’ll confess that I found myself enjoying the song without necessarily paying full attention to the music, but then for a band who pay this much attention to the visual element of their music maybe they don’t entirely separate the two either.

In any case, I thought this was fun.  The choreography is well executed, and every couple of minutes there’s something else rather funny happening.  Enjoy.