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Be Prepared to Rev Like a Car All Day!
Posted by Ellen at June 04, 2005 06:34 AMwha-wha-what?!?
That was disturbing. Nothing like seeing some random animal with its twig and berries hanging out for the whole world...
I need a drink.
Posted by: ronaprhys on June 4, 2005 01:49 PMWell, in the preview version, the frog didn't have visible genitalia. You can tell this is a European video...
Anyhow, as for the background on this... Long time ago (internet long, about a year or so), some guy used his voice to imitate the sound a Swedish moped makes, recorded it, and posted it on his homepage with an ASCII art picture of a motorcycle. In fact, I think AMCGLTD linked to it at one point, but I'm too lazy to comb the archives for a link that's almost certainly gone 404 by now.
Anyhow, people viewed the web page, laughed at it, said stuff like "Hey Bernie, this sounds like your new ride!" and then forgot about it.
Then a little website called Jamster got wind of it. One of a thousand million other "free ringtone" websites, they decided that the Swedish moped mp3 would not only make a good ringtone (see, it sounds like the guy is going "ring-ding-ding," right?), but could even be their signature ring tone, the one that let them finally break away from the rest of the pack of also-rans.
Now, while their ringtone was extremely silly, so are a lot of other ringtones offered by a lot of other sites. And, to their credit, Jamster went the extra mile in marketing their ringtone.
- Create marketable character. In this case, a CGI frog so ugly he's almost cute. And give the European version genitalia, for the same "cool" factor anime once relied on ("our stupid parents don't want us to see this stuff" always sells to preteen kids, even if it is just a cartoon frog's penis).
- Make an internet banner you can't ignore. OH LORDY did they succeed in this one. The infamous Jamster banner, featuring a simple animation of the "Crazy Frog," broke the cardinal rule of advertising banners: DON'T MAKE NOISES. Of course, the noise it made was the Swedish moped, now Crazy Frog, ring tone. They ran this ad until people started refusing to host them because of the complaints they were getting about it, then replaced it with a silent version that looks enough like the original to make me cringe and automatically reach for the "off" switch on my speaker whenever I see it.
- Once the inital "blitz" was done, it was time for character development. Release new shorts with the "Crazy Frog" doing all kinds of things, from scratching discs as a nightclub deejay, to their latest... fleeing the wrath of extremely annoyed Internet users everywhere, to the tune of Axel F (with Crazy Frog accompaniment), and proving himself damned near indestructible.
Needless to say, Jamster is now Numero Uno in the ringtone industry, and are now able to actually CHARGE for their ringtones and still remain popular. In fact, Crazy Frog is the number one ringtone in Europe, and the Axel F remix in this video has actually hit the Top 40 charts.
Of course, if you don't have Shockwave Flash and buggy anti-ad software, then you didn't get to experience this little slice of internet history and now your kids will see you as hopelessly square for not "getting it."
Heh... wow... and I thought I knew a lot about obscure useless stuff. I'm not sure which is worse... that you knew all this stuff, or that I found it interesting.
FWIW, yup, we did link it years and years ago, only it was attached to the picture of an F-1 car (which also sounds a lot like a Swedish moped apparently).
Posted by: scott on June 5, 2005 11:49 AM