This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
A while ago, I wrote about a science version of the popular Epic Rap Battles of History about a showdown between Einstein and Hawking. It was amusing and a great way to use popular culture to highlight science.
Capitalizing on the successful genre of Epic Rap Battles of History, Life Technologies has created a video highlighting two of their products.
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I asked Andrew Green (@andrewjgreen on twitter), the leader for the video channel for the Molecular and Cellular Biology portion of Life Technologies, from his office in Oslo, Norway about the project and how he came up with the idea:
I got the idea for this video while on a teleconference (in a grocery store) with Jeremy Schoales, the digital marketing manager for qPCR at Life Technologies and asked him to watch one of the Epic Rap Battles while I checked out. When we spoke a few minutes later, I explained how using the dual role of a Rap Battle and music would be perfect to deliver the features of two products that are equally liked but for different reasons.
Yes, the Lab Rap Battle is a piece of marketing but our inspiration for creating it was the anticipation of genuine comments that make us believe we are doing marketing that is memorable and that has meaning."
People have posted comments under the video such as,“My science teacher showed this in class today. This video is awesome because I can learn it with rhyme.”, “This video makes me want to work for Life Technologies”
...and seeing people tweet the lyrics like @laCooie "Five prime chemistry works best to validate, you're just green with envy, why you haters gotta hate?" This kind of customer interaction is the source of our inspiration.
I imagine these videos must create such a buzz around the company, knowing that anyone could possibly be chosen to star in them. In this case, Sybr is played by Jeremy Schoales, and TaqMan by Chris Leyerle, both Marketing Managers for Genetic Analysis at Life Technologies. Jeremy also managed the project from Life’s side vis a vis Wooshii who was responsible for the production. All the “extras” were also Life Technologies employees, nabbed from neighboring cubes and walked the 100 feet to the warehouse where it was shot!
The lyrics are created by the Life Technologies team, which includes Andrew and music by Jonny Bull, who has also collaborated on the PhDiddy series!
So, all of you cell and molecular biologists out there, who do you think won this Lab Rap Battle?