If you’ve been on X (formerly Twitter) in the past few weeks, chances are you’ve been haunted by Big Banju. The upcoming artist has taken a popular marketing strategy, social media ads, and placed it on steroids. His ads are literally everywhere, seemingly with no regard for target audience selection. But is this approach working?
The posts themselves are innocuous enough; the “Who is Big Banju?” clearly meant to pique users’ interest, and the clear call to action “, Open Spotify and search Big Banju”. On top of those, he engaged influencers to gas up his debut single “Ada”, making it such that one cannot enjoy a leisurely scroll through their timeline without encountering the artist’s name at least 3 times per minute.
With all the power the internet and social media specifically hold over an artist’s career in terms of reach, it makes sense that someone looking for their big break would want to capitalise on it. However, it’s easier said than done due to the sheer volume of content on social media, thousands of people across the same industry are chasing the same thing the artist is, not counting the content from millions of people using the platforms solely for leisure. That’s a heck of a lot of noise to cut through, so it makes sense that one might see the advantage in being a bit aggressive.
This type of ad spamming might be smart, thanks to the mere-exposure effect, a psychology concept positing that people are more open to liking things the more familiar they are. It’s basically the other POV of the proverb “out of sight is out of mind”. So the theory is, aggressively putting his name in our faces has the tendency to make Big Banju and his music more appealing to us. Unfortunately, there’s the flip side: it’s honestly just annoying. Users have reported feeling harassed by the frequency of the ads and described it as “torment”. Some others have resorted to outrightly blocking him to enjoy some decorum on their timelines.
Ad spamming like this doesn’t only occur in the music scene, it’s the same strategy employed by fintech and betting apps with deep pockets and fat budgets who subject us to the same ad twenty times a day. It’s become the go-to play for some digital marketers: create one catchy piece of content, then run it into the ground until people either convert or complain.
Big Banju may or may not be the next big thing (his song “Ada” was just under 29k streams on Spotify at the time this was written), but he has taught us one thing: visibility can be hacked. So, once again, is this approach working? As long as he doesn’t mind being complained about, made into a running joke, and the fact that his name is on everyone’s lips (and not always positively), one thing’s for sure: everyone will know who Big Banju is.
