Song: “The Future Is a Foreign Land”

Marketing is an oft-underappreciated success factor in the information space.

As someone who appreciates good marketing, it’s always exciting to encounter a marketing genius in an unexpected place.

Tobias Forge — lead singer and prime mover of the band Ghost — is one such genius.

Here’s evidence gathered from last month’s release of a concert film by the band:

• The concert movie — Rite Here, Rite Now — was announced via short YouTube trailers and some social posts about three weeks before it debuted.
• The band made it available in theaters for only two nights, an enforced scarcity that guaranteed sold out shows.
  • This made the movie a Top 10 box office hit for its single week of release — again, on only two nights of showings.
    • Clever marketing is often cheaper marketing, too.
• In the theaters, fans were decked out as Ghost characters, in Ghost t-shirts, and so forth.
  • There were no trailers before the movie started, a blessed relief.
• Once the lights went down, a character from a set of online featurettes came on, glowering at the audience, as a timer appeared in the lower righthand corner of the screen.
• The character instructed the audience to get ready to take selfies and pictures for two minutes, and then upload them using a QR code that then appeared on the screen.
  • Within minutes, Ghost Central had thousands of images of fans, uploaded from hundreds of sold out theaters around the world.

The concert film was excellent, with superb camera work and impeccable sound, while the storyline created by interstitial dramatic segments advanced the tongue-in-cheek narrative of the Ghost world.

The film also introduced a new song that continued the retrospective expansion of the Ghost universe, now taking it into the 1960s — in this case, specifically 1969 — complete with a soundscape that is reminiscent of the times.

• This is another way Ghost has smartly expanded their remit from a fusion of modern pop and metal to include tones and song styles now reaching back decades.
  • They are very good at creating permission for themselves to do whatever they want.

Give it until the chorus, and I think you’ll see why people get hooked on this group’s tunes and odd sense of humor, which seems to connect obliquely with the absurd spirit of the times we live in.

And if you get to transition out of the bridge, bam!

Enjoy!