After an escalating series of viral stunts, internet collective MSCHF is taking on advertising itself. On Monday, the collective posted a series of jingles on TikTok aimed as a broadside against the primary source of funding for social networks. Some of the jingles call out the general concept, while others take on specific brands the group has decided to target: Amazon, Comcast, Facebook, Fashion Nova, the NFL, Palantir, Purdue, and even TikTok itself.
“We had our team [do some] digging on them, and found nine that had some form of dirt we didn’t like and wanted to bring to light more,” Daniel Greenberg, MSCHF’s creative strategist, tells The Verge. “Attack TikTok for content suppression. Attack Fashion Nova for stealing designs and using sweatshops. Attack the NFL for disregarding player safety. Attack Purdue Pharma for opioid crisis profiteering.”
MSCHF has made a name for itself through a number of different drops and viral stunts, including partnering with YouTube creator MrBeast to hand out $25,000 for competing in a days-long game. For this stunt, MSCHF is planning to give out $50,000 in total to creators who use the jingles and reach a certain threshold of views. Each brand has a different payout and different required number of views, so people who hit 5,000 views for attacking TikTok will get $50, while people who amass 50,000 views attacking Amazon will get $100.
“The idea was kinda two fold,” Greenberg says. “The first thought was, ‘What would ads be that brands would never run because they’d never bash themselves?’ The second was, ‘How do you let anyone become ‘an influencer?’ but of course MSCHF has to do that in a creative, almost destructive way.”
At the time of this writing, a few of the tracks had more than 10,000 views (with one song sitting at more than 33,000 views) while others had amassed just over 5,000. The goal is for at least one of the songs dunking on one of the corporations to go viral. Full details for the drop can be found on MSCHF’s Anti Advertising Advertising Club website.
