‘Tis the diss-season by Shakira

You know how January always feels like a month that never ends? The holiday cheer fades out, our mood drops, and everything seems so… boring.

There’s an expression that describes this feeling perfectly - January Blues.

Well, this January was more of a rock-and-roll than blues for Shakira and Gerard Pique. They’ve?hit the headlines worldwide with their ping-pong of insults following their separation and Shakira’s new revenge song. Who started it?

Let’s back up a little.

Last year in June, Shakira and Pique announced that they were separating after 11 years of dating. After a couple of months of silence, the public found out that the reason for this shocking twist was Pique’s infidelity. And the back-and-forth began, reaching its climax in mid-January, and the release of Shakira’s savage new song, BZRP Music Session #53. But hold on to your popcorn - it’s not over yet.

As seen on our mentions over time graph - since the song came out on 12th January, there have been peaks in mentions every couple of days. The reason is quite simple - the fight is led out in public while the dirty laundry following the accusations stated in the song keeps coming out perpetually.?

The song is quite explicit, with lines brutally dissing Pique and his new girlfriend:

“I’m worth two 22-year-olds” and

“I was out of your league, which is why you’re with someone just like you”,

but also offending some rather popular brands along the way in lyrics like: “You swapped a Ferrari for a Twingo/You swapped a Rolex for a Casio.”

Shakira also mentions Pique’s mom, who is, interestingly enough, her next-door neighbor and whom she thinks very strongly of:

The response?

Pique bought a Twingo a couple of days later and drove it to work as a protest, and both Renault and Casio announced possible lawsuits against the singer for damaging their reputation. And it seems that the saga continues.

Be it what may, Shakira racked up a record-setting 82 million views in 24 hours on YouTube and lit up social media, which started competing in coming up with the most creative meme.?

How did this mess influence the mentioned brands? Let’s take a look.

Catching the train

Since its release, Shakira’s music video has been viewed more than 206 million times and hasn’t left Youtube’s top 10 trending videos.?

The online conversations had such a positive impact on the media exposure of both Casio and Twingo: 44 billion impressions for Castio and 8 billion for Twingo. If this was measured in terms of media impact value, the verse earned Casio a whopping amount of $176 million and $32 million for Twingo in two weeks. (That was if the average CPM across all platforms was $3,99)

Just a day after the song was released, a couple of tweets coming from, allegedly, Casio turned up.?

These quickly turned out to be not from Casio’s official team, but did impact the brand very positively. One of the main reasons why this tweet reached a viral audience was due to the fact that the majority of Casio’s audience was already on Twitter talking about Shakira’s latest diss track.

How can Casio take advantage of this situation even more?

Even though both Shakira and Pique are global stars, the majority of the conversations about the song and Casio were held in Spanish-speaking countries. By tracking online conversations, we were able to draw out a heatmap that shows where Casio has been mentioned the most.

For Casio, this would impose a great opportunity: since they’re already the center of attention in the countries shown above, Casio could benefit from investing in paid content in these areas, pushing their potential customers to visit their webshop.

Casio could also benefit from analyzing the word cloud around their name. Since using trending keywords and hashtags increases the reach, this could be Casio’s next strategy. Especially generating a word cloud by the number of interactions. This would mean that they would get a set of keywords that already generate the most engagement and could use it in their next attempt at going viral, thus generating more visits to their websites and, finally, increasing sales.

Even though Shakira’s new song put Casio in the context of a “not-so-great” brand, Casio’s imposer account and its fans turned the conversation upside down. Let’s see how Casio will take this advantage further!

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*All metric screenshots are taken directly from Mediatoolkit, a media monitoring tool.