Breakin’ in the ‘Rain’

Kenny Kong, a 22-year-old undergrad who gives break dancing lessons to fellow UC Berkeley students, clicked open a forwarded link to a new Volkswagen commercial -- the one popping up on plenty of hip-hop blogs and other Web threads these past few weeks.

“A friend sent me the same link last week,” he said, as he watched the opening shot of Gene Kelly humming a few bars to himself during a rain shower on an empty street. But Kong still digs it.

“I started busting up the first time I saw this part,” he said when, suddenly, the “Singin’ in the Rain” melody grinds to an out-of-gas halt, the drip-drops of a dance remix drop, and Kelly’s classic gait takes on a can’t-stop body-rock that’s one for the ages.

Yes, Kong knows it’s just another slick, computer-generated car ad, just another Madison Avenue love letter to Hollywood Boulevard that’s so far off the cultural references of his own street cred that he’s never heard of Gene Kelly or his 1952 MGM musical. No matter.

“It’s tight,” Kong said while imitating some of Kelly’s moves with his own Jell-O-jointed arms. “It’s real tight.”

That kind of approval from young, clued and coveted consumers like Kong has been a pleasant surprise for Volkswagen -- but underscores just how radically the advertising marketplace is being remade by the Internet and so-called viral video.

Volkswagen U.K. had commissioned the commercial unveiling the new GTI Golf for British outlets, where it premiered in late January. It’s rare for one market’s TV ad to air in a different country because of cultural nuances and other complications such as licensing fees, so a U.S. broadcast wasn’t even considered, said Annouchka Behrmann, speaking for DDB London, the advertising agency that masterminded the commercial.

But in the end, it was precisely the commercial’s inaccessibility to U.S. airwaves, along with its youth-connected creativity, that unexpectedly played into Volkswagen’s hands by also playing into youth marketing’s zeitgeist moment: young people’s rejection of traditional media and the advent of alternative advertising.

In many instances, “alternative” has become synonymous with the Internet, where viral videos -- be it a Bush-bashing animation or a regular multimillion-dollar car commercial -- can easily cruise at today’s broadband speeds.

“The hip-hop and break-dancing community is more connected to the Internet than anything else right now, so I guess that’s the best way to reach me,” Kong agreed. “Other than that, you’ll have to use word-of-mouth.”

That’s why forwarded Internet content from friends is so effective. It combines a dynamic, ever-changing medium with an old, trusted one.

AdCritic.com editor Jim Hanas, whose subscription service tracks the most popular commercials seen among professionals in the ad industry, said that the spot stayed on the site’s daily Top 10 list for an unusual number of days.

“I can see why the commercial has been so popular,” he said, noting a car commercial trend that includes a recent Mustang ad featuring the late Steve McQueen in his “Bullitt” role.

Hanas also said the ad has a great heritage message for a tag line -- “The Original, Updated” -- which mirrors the cultural attitude that can also be heard in the commercial’s dance track.

“We wanted [the ad] to be a bit of a surprise when the new elements happened, hence starting the track exactly like the original,” said Neil Claxton, one-half of the British electronic music act Mint Royale, who updated “Singin’ in the Rain” with a decidedly break-beat kick.

Getting the rights to remix an institutionalized on-screen wonderland didn’t come easily.

“We did have long negotiations with Turner Movies, the Gene Kelly Trust, EMI [Music] and Warner Bros. to make this,” Behrmann said. She said Volkswagen’s payment amount for the licenses was “significant.”

The hardest part, according to Behrmann, was persuading Kelly’s widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, to sign on.

“We ended up writing her a really nice letter,” Behrmann says. “We wrote how we thought Gene Kelly was a very forward-thinking dancer during his time, and if he were dancing today, perhaps this is what his dancing would look like.”

Kelly’s widow eventually approved the concept, the final art (the set was re-created at Shepperton Studios in the U.K.) and even the break-dancing and popping moves, performed by three dancers: L.A.’s David “Elsewhere” Bernal and Crumbs and the U.K.’s Jay Walker.

Each dance sequence retraces Kelly’s exact path in the movie, so that the digital mapping of Kelly’s face could work in each frame of the commercial. A few times a prosthetic mask of Kelly’s face was used for the wider shots, but most of the time the dancers who filled in the new moves “were actually wearing goggles,” Behrmann said.

The interest in the commercial has spurred Volkswagen U.K. to launch an interactive version of the spot, complete with behind-the-scenes footage, on its website this month.

Hanas said the organic spread of the Volkswagen spot was key to its phenomenon -- and nearly impossible to reproduce on demand.

“Marketers are looking to create content that behaves like something that gets passed around organically on the Internet,” Hanas said. “That’s hard to do.”

Hard to do for marketers, easier for everyone else.

Case in point: Volkswagen’s Internet success with this GTI commercial comes just a month after the company put in considerable effort insisting it had nothing to do with a spec spot (a commercial created strictly for a director’s demo reel) that was forwarded again and again with lightning speed.

Created by the British directing team Lee and Dan, the spot featured a suicide bomber detonating a bomb inside a Volkswagen Polo -- a car so strong that, as the punch line suggests, it contains the explosion, which kills only the bomber.

As advertisers try to tame the unpredictable currents of the Internet for their own use, expect Kong’s ilk to mature just as fast, spotting those marketing techniques from miles away.

Fortunately for advertisers, sometimes these young consumers spot it and still like it.

A few days later, via e-mail, Kong offers this breakdown on the ad: “In other commercials, like the recent Coca-Cola commercial, they use hip-hop -- whether it be music with scratching or B-boys busting power moves -- just for the sake of having it there. But in this commercial they use it as a metaphor for their car: remixing the original. It has a greater purpose within the commercial.”

Savvy stuff, but what did he think about the car?

“I don’t know,” he said later on his cellphone. “I actually didn’t get a good look at the car.”