Marketing and Music: Sarah McLachlan's $15 Music Video Sets the World on Fire

The Power of Being Second

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How to Buy a Grammy Nomination for $15

It’s 2003. Sarah McLachlan has just released her latest single, World on Fire. She contacts her label, Arista, who cuts her a check for $150,000.00 so she can make a video for the song.

However, just as Sarah was about to start work on her video, she came across a newspaper article that changed the entire direction of the project. It was an article in a Canadian newspaper that focused on the charitable work that a group Engineers Without Borders was doing around the world.

Intrigued, Sarah started investigating the group. On their website, Mike Quinn would post ‘field updates’ of some of the work they did and the people they encountered:

I visit a woman with a stunning smile every night to buy oranges. Her name is Christy Yaa and she never lets me pay for my oranges because she wants me to take them as a gift. She works everyday from 6am until 2pm as a cleaner, and then from 4pm until midnight selling oranges. She does this seven days a week. She is a single mother and every penny she earns goes towards putting her 20-year-old son through secondary school near her home village, far from Accra. When she saves enough money for a bus ticket, she'll travel to see him.

As an engineer in Canada I would have made more in a day than she does in a year.

And still, she does not let me pay for my oranges.

Sarah was overcome with appreciation and awe for the work of Engineers Without Borders. So much so, that she decided to take the $150,000 that Arista had given her, and she donated almost every penny to 11 charitable organizations, including Engineers Without Borders.

All told, Sarah donated $149,985 to 11 charitable organizations that ended up positively impacting the lives of over one million people around the world.

Which was an incredibly generous gesture by Sarah, but Arista was still expecting Sarah to create a music video for World on Fire.

But she did still have $15 left, so she took those last few dollars and bought a video tape, then she got some friends to donate their time to create and produce a music video. What Sarah did was create a very basic and simple music video that outlined the typical expenses for creating a music video. For example, a Production Assistant might cost $200 a day, office phones cost $480 each, and the cost of hair and makeup would be $5,000 a day.

Sarah then detailed what that money was spent on instead of the normal expense. The $200 that would have normally covered the cost of a Production Assistant for a day, was instead spent on providing 1 term’s worth of schooling for 100 children in Ethiopia. The $480 that would have normally been spent on an office phone, instead equipped 10 schools in Afghanistan. That $5,000 for hair and makeup? It was spent on providing a year’s worth of schooling for 145 girls in Afghanistan.

Sarah created an amazing video that detailed how all of us can contribute just a little bit of money, and still make a huge impact on people that are less fortunate than ourselves. What made the video even more compelling was that Sarah not only showed us what the money was spent on, she also showed us the VERY PEOPLE that were helped. For example, at one point in the video we are introduced to a woman in Ghana that works 16 hours a day, 7 days a week to raise the $200 that’s needed to send her son to school each year. As part of Sarah’s $150,000 donation, this woman received a $1,000 grant that will cover her son’s schooling for the next 5 years, which also means that the mother won’t have to work as much, and can spend more time with her son.

That woman was Christy Yaa. The same Christy Yaa that Mike Curtis had mentioned in his ‘field update’ above.

When asked about why she structured the video the way she did, Sarah explained “I wanted a video that wasn’t about me and wasn’t preachy, but one that would help shine a light on the tragedy and turmoil in the world and also show the beauty and strength of the human spirit.”

And BTW, World on Fire also went on to be nominated for a Grammy Award.

So for $150,000, Sarah was able to help over one million people around the world AND earn a Grammy nomination. That’s a pretty decent ROI on a $15 investment.

Here’s the video for World on Fire. I go back and forth between this one and Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt as to which is my favorite music video of all-time:

The Power of Being Second

Note above that Sarah explained that she wanted a video that “wasn’t about me”.

I began my public speaking career in the spring of 2008. It seems odd that an introvert would be drawn to public speaking, but I love it. Over the course of my first year speaking, I made a handful of appearances at conferences and events across the country. My sessions were well-received, but nothing spectacular.

Then in the summer of 2009, I spoke at an event called Y’all Connect in my home state of Alabama. I debuted a new talk called “What Rock Stars Can Teach You About Kicking Ass With Social Media”. Now that I think about it, this story I’m telling about how Sarah created the video for World on Fire was likely one of the examples I used in that talk.

Whereas my other talks up to this point had received more modest reactions, the audience was standing room only for this talk. People were having to stand up at the back of the room just to hear the talk. Every seat was taken.

What had changed? Why was this particular talk so well received? I realized that I hadn’t changed as a speaker, but my topic had! The topic itself was what engaged the audience. This was a crucial lesson, from that point forward whenever I speak, I structure my talk so that the core idea of the talk is in the spotlight. I am not the focus, my idea is.

Sarah did the same thing with World on Fire’s video. She, as the artist, is barely featured. The star of the video is the story she is telling. It’s the way she spent the money, the reason why she spent the money, and most importantly, the people that she helped with that money.

In the course of Sarah’s almost 40 year musical career, she’s only received one Grammy nomination for a music video: The above video for World on Fire. What made that video different? She told an amazing story, but she put herself second, and let the story itself be the star.

It’s a concept that’s quite lost in today’s world of marketing and promotion. The best self promotion you can do is to tell a story that your clients can see themselves being a part of. You don’t make yourself the star of the story, the star is your customer or client. You talk about the change that they can make and the result those changes will lead to.

In World on Fire, Sarah encourages viewers to make changes. To think about what role their actions could play on others. To be more intentional with their giving, to reach down and help the less fortunate as a way to lift them up into self-sufficiency.

At the end of the day, your most effective marketing focuses on the change that you can make for your customer or client. It’s their story, not yours. When you understand and accept that, you can then begin to connect with your desired audience on a level that your competition simply cannot match.

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Marketing and Music. Next month’s edition is MTV Goes Unplugged.

Have a great weekend!

Mack