Hey Bulldog

Last week I got in my car on Friday morning to head into work. The Sirius XM radio was already on but I was a little confused. I’m a bit of an old soul and have several older stations on my preset such as 50’s on 5 and the Beatles Channel 18 as well as stations that play more modern songs such as Hits 1 and local stations. I was feeling in the mood for pop songs to sing to on my hour long commute so I clicked Hits 1, where I was expecting to hear Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift or The Chain Smokers, but instead, I was greeted with ‘Hey Bulldog’ by the Beatles.

At first, I thought I had hit the wrong preset. When I chose Hits 1 again, the radio didn’t change. I thought something was wrong with my radio and that I had been on the Beatles Channel and now my radio was stuck. Then I thought maybe the Morning Mashup (morning radio show) had been talking about something that related so they wanted to play a bit of the song.

Turns out, they were having serious technical difficulties with their computer systems and the only song that would play was ‘Hey Bulldog’. I listened to the channel for an hour on my commute, and they still hadn’t solved the Hey Bulldog problem.

What was so inspirational about this incident was the way Sirius XM, the Morning Mashup and the fans handled the glitch. #HeyBulldog started to trend on Twitter and somehow fans went crazy for the song, they loved the excitement of something so strange and different. The fans loved it so much that it can still occasionally be heard on the station.

Some think this was all a clever ruse to promote the new Beatles Channel because it wasn’t performing as well as they thought. As a relatively new public relations professional, I think that is an extremely risky promotional plan, but so crazy it might just work. Listening to the show live, It seemed like a real issue, unrehearsed and a true technical error. What do you think, true glitch, or elaborate promotion?