Evolution of Dance 2 – How to shamelessly commercialise a viral legend

I promised myself I wouldn’t write about the scrutinised sequel to ‘Evolution of Dance’, a viral which to date has clocked up a mind blowing 121 million views since its release in 2006, however I going to anyway. The reason for this is simply because the further you look into the journey toward Evolution of Dance 2, the more cringe worthy it becomes.


Evolution of Dance


Evolution of Dance 2 is an exact replica of the first, slightly adapted with some different songs, and dances throughout the past few decades. The main difference this time round however is that the video is sponsored by Comparison shopping site Saveology, and self-improvement site PeopleJam.


Evolution of Dance 2

The build up to the release of the video was littered with everything you can imagine from a campaign which quite simply attempted get as much as it could from the pre-buzz as possible, including a chance to upload your image to become a dancer in an online video version of the dance, uploading it to your social network page etc etc.


"Evolution of You!" - www.eod2.com


We could dwell on this for ages, and debate how to carry out a successful ‘viral’ campaign and so on, but the truth of the matter is the sequel will no doubt generate an astounding number of views, I mean it already has reached the 1.5 million mark since the 12th January! I’m also guessing that this is by no means the last time we’re going to find ourselves talking about Judson Laipply and his Evolution of Dance.

So could it have been approached better… probably yes? Should it have been revisited at all… probably no? Is this therefore a successful campaign... I suppose it depends how we define successful?