Entrant Company
Rhino Entertainment
Medium Type
Music Marketing
Medium
Integrated Campaign
Fifty years after forming and breaking out of New York's Bowery scene, Talking Heads remain uniquely singular. To celebrate the anniversary of their first show at CBGBs, Rhino Entertainment partnered with us to execute a campaign that embodied the band's punk-adjacent, IYKYK ethos in and around the Bowery, Lower East Side, and the greater Manhattan. Using guerrilla street marketing, buskers, radio, billboards, flyers, and more, refrains from Talking Heads' iconic hit "Psycho Killer" slowly took over New York. Buskers along the F-train performed "Psycho Killer" (off the band's debut record, Talking Heads '77). NYU radio hosted a takeover day where they played Talking Heads music and repeated "Fa Fa Fa" (the refrain from "Psycho Killer") for 24 hours. We plastered key neighborhoods with stickers, billboards, and flyers in the iconic debut album's recognizable red and green pantones and font and created one-of-a-kind t-shirts for Chinatown retailers. Fa Fa Fa flashed on a Times Square Billboard. We flew an aerial banner that just said "Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa fa Fa" in the Talking Heads '77 colors and font over Coney Island, and capped the campaign with the world premiere of the first-ever official music video for "Psycho Killer" at 195 Chrystie Street, the very building where David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth lived when they were first launching the band.