The Power Of The Little Guy (McCann? Listen Up!)

For awhile now, celebrities have had the power to break a brand within large demos where advertisers wouldn’t naturally take them. A perfect example is Jay-Z’s remarkable promotion that took Cristal out of its elite 1% consumer base and pushed it into the other 99%. However, Hova was talking about Cristal long before he went platinum. Brands are missing out on the opportunity to make alliances with promoters of their products before they’re worth 100 million dollars and dating Beyonce. It’s an great way to touch base with often hard to reach segments of the population that wide broadcast nets often miss. These extensions are everywhere, but agencies need to get curious, get off their butts and seek these advocates out no matter if they’re an author of comic books or the next Amy Winehouse. This is what we get paid to do people.

Case in point: Meet Lil Mama. She’s a seventeen year old rap artist straight out of Brooklyn who recently got signed to Jive records and is at number 25 on the indie billboard charts. She’s got 220,000 friends on MySpace. On YouTube, she’s racked up four million views. And if you work for McCann Erickson you should be cheering right now. You guys have L’Oreal as an account and Lil Mama drops their name twice in this video above for her single “Lip Gloss.”

Recently, L’Oreal launched HIP with their in-house team and everyone knows it didn’t go quite as swimmingly as they would of liked. HIP, as far as we know, had two key demos: young ladies (hence that horrible name) and women of color. We hear… that L’Oreal is letting you kids at McCann run the account again. Take the opportunity before you and get on board with Lil Mama before she’s blowing out stadiums. We’re not saying she needs to be the global face of the brand, but riddle us this: wouldn’t it make sense to sponsor a web show with her on YouTube BEFORE she’s huge? She’s a powerful influencer. She’s also no Lil Kim, so need to worry about her getting arrested or rapping about her crotch. “Everybody’s talking about the same things on the radio-murder, sex and drugs,” says Mama. “They have people behind them telling them it’s cool and I disagree. There are so many more people struggling and going through so much and to hear somebody brag about the jewelry and stuff like that, it’s overrated.” What’s better than that?

Ps. We’re giving you kids at McCann this info for free. We know you’re struggling over there. You can thank us later.

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