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Sixteen years after his United Breaks Guitars video went viral, my friend, the Canadian singer-songwriter Dave Carroll, is back with another musical message for the airline world.
I was one of the first people to recognize the power of the original United Breaks Guitars video, writing about it on my blog in 2009 and using it as an example in my talks about real-time marketing and social media. The video had millions of views soon after its release, and got United Airlines and other organizations to reconsider how they do customer service in a social media world.
As a result of the video, Dave was invited to speak about customer service at companies and events around the world. We presented together at several events, including one in Istanbul.
His new single and music video, Don’t Fly Wizzness Class, shines a spotlight on the experience of Sukhrob Ubaydullaev, a 26-year-old citizen of Uzbekistan who was denied boarding by Wizz Air under troubling circumstances in 2023.
Does a traditional approach work in a new world?
As I write this, Don’t Fly Wizzness Class has nearly 200,000 views on the various platforms and one of Dave’s shorts promoting the video on Instagram has 200,000 views.
Since Dave told me about the new video about Wizz Air, I’ve been wondering about how applicable an approach that worked great in 2009 would be in 2025. The algorithms have changed, there are new video tools like TikTok, and now videos can be made by AI.
Here are a few thoughts:
There is always opportunity to tell a good story: “Better storytelling will always help your content standout over other stuff,” Dave told me. “This project is old school in a new school world,” “Real musicians recording a human-written song in a real studio. It was shot on a DSLR camera that required a skilled human director of photography to make creative decisions, and the editing was done by me.”
The power of short form video: The short video promo that he shared has as many views as the full music video. People have short attention spans, and the various platforms have seemingly unlimited amounts of video to check out.
Great content goes global: “My feed is lighting up with people from Uzbekistan who feel like they are invisible to the world and they are energized to be seen,” Dave says. “It’s another reminder that I have the skills to bring people together in a polarizing world.”
