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When it first broke at the end of February something told us that the three.co.uk film starring Socks the moonwalking Shetland Pony would create a renewed interest in late Seventies superstars Fleetwood Mac and their 1988 Top Five single Everywhere.
Of course the Mac’s reputation will forever be tarnished for being so successful with an inimitable California-styled soft country rock at exactly the same time that Punk was trying to blow all that sort of stuff out of the water.
But after years of undeserved vilification, the Anglo American band has always demanded critical rehabilitation and to an extent they got it in Week 10 when Christine McVie’s song went straight back into the Official Charts at Number 15.
Whether that was as the result of enthusiastic Shazam-driven sales we cannot say. But the fact that the single began to slip significantly down the charts over the next three weeks – even as three.co.uk began to replace the original Socks spot with one or other of the eight other films which make up this fascinating Weiden+Kennedy campaign (see this month’s Sync Of The Month feature – begs an interesting question.
Would Everywhere have climbed higher – or at least sustained the retail momentum which has seen it sell very nearly 46,000 copies at time of writing – if three.co.uk had limited themselves to a single execution? And indeed could spreading the campaign out over nine different iterations actually have diluted the three.co.uk message in the same way it might have diluted those Fleetwood Mac sales?
These are things we’ll certainly never know.
Similarly we may never know whether ITV’s trailer makers and programme schedulers always planned to use Birdy’s atmospheric People Help The People as the trailer to the David Tennant and Olivia Colman Monday night chiller. Or could it be that they made a fortuitous last minute decision to plug into the unexpected chart success of a single which originally released in October 2011 and became a surprise entry to the Top 75 at the end of January?
Either way there is no getting away from the fact that the one must have boosted the profile of the other and vice versa. Which is how it should be out there in sync land!
