Oh boy, #TheDress again
This freaking dress. All that #breaktheinternet crap doesn’t even hold a candle to what this freaking dress did. I wouldn’t be surprised if North Korea finally declares war on us because we are convinced it’s white and gold and Kim Jong Un swears on the lives of his subordinates that it’s blue and black.
I knew when I got home that night and turned on my computer that I would probably need to write a piece about it for AG. “This dress is the devil” or “this dress has ruined my marriage” were among the top posts in my feed. And when I clicked on it, I just saw a plain old white and gold dress. That’s it.
But the important part isn’t what color the dress is
To be honest, I could care less if it was actually pink and purple and the internet pulled one over on the whole universe. What actually matters is that almost everyone with a social media account decided to focus on one thing.
With this being said, keep in mind that it was not a carefully orchestrated ad campaign, crafted to engage audiences from all continents and walks of life. It’s just. A freaking. Dress. Sheesh.
Nonetheless, the original posting on Tumblr racked up 73 million views in the blink of an eye. This does not include the seemingly endless subsequent posts about the dress and the debate. BuzzFeed alone posted about the dress 31 times, which is more publicity than most cats get on that site. The dress was the recipient 140k views per minute for an hour on Friday night.
An important note to take from #TheDress
The entire internet population decided to drop all of the other stupid stuff they normally argue about and focus on something somehow even more arbitrary, and apparently, infuriating.
An important note to take from this is that a debate gets people talking. If you give an option, people will argue until the cows come home. Everybody and their grandma wanted to weigh in and shove down your throat that their two cents are the correct two cents.
Marketing folks should be taking notes. Anything that can gain this much traction in a single night deserves to be broken down, studied, and ideally replicated. But if you want to top this debacle, I wish you all the luck in the world. You’ll need it.
