If you watch TV, there’s no escaping the snappy jingles with the clever lyrics for Freecreditreport.com. How can you forget the young tussle-haired guy, whose identity was stolen by hackers, dressed up in pirate attire in a restaurant, or the lyrics as he finishes his song: "They monitor your credit and send you e-mail alerts ... So you don’t end up selling fish to tourists in t-shirts."
Or the guy driving a used sub-compact because his “credit was whacked”? Or the dude who married his dream girl but ended up living in her parents’ basement because her credit was bad?
Those ads, which are fast becoming a cultural phenomenon like the GEICO gecko and cavemen, is the handicraft of David Muhlenfeld, a creative staffer at the Martin Agency. Impressed by the agency’s work on the cavemen, Freecreditreport.com hired Martin on a project basis to create some commercials. Muhlenfeld, who did not work on the cavemen, was assigned to the account.
As he tells the story to the Yuppiepunk website, Muhlenfeld started with a handful of songs for a radio campaign. Because the TV ads he was creating didn’t have enough material, he adapted the radio jingles into TV spots. The client loved them.
The campaign was extremely effective at driving traffic to freecreditreport.com, and the commercials became viral hits.
“Somebody leaked the spots onto YouTube,” Muhlenfeld said. “At first we got 600 hits, and then 1,200 hits, and then we checked back in a week or so and it was 20,000 hits. And now it’s up to 600,000 or 700,000 for each of them. … Without really even trying to create a viral-type success, we did. And now of course we’re going to try and convince people we meant to do that all along.”
Muhlenfeld thinks the spots worked so well because the band in the commercials, led by actor Eric Violette, think of themselves as a real band. “They’re real ballads about this guy’s sad ass life.”
You know you’re a bona fide cultural phenomenon when you inspire a bunch of parodies on YouTube. Here are a couple of the better ones:
Dream girl parody
Car song parody