 You don't hear anything different until you hear the lyric hit and you're like, that wait, what? Vax, people were blown away by that. It's too late at that point. You already sucked it. You're already dancing. Like you're already in it. I'm Asinir Davis. I am founding partner and Chief Strategy Officer at Majority. I'm Omid Farang, founder and CEO at Majority. My name's Sebastian Urea. I am a director, producer and I own a company called Motion Family in Somacon. My name's Ibrahim Ham-Yula. I'm a first AD slash director and I work with Motion Family. I'm Jonathan Kirkland, head of marketing and brand for BLK Dating Act. Government name Byron Thomas, which all most of y'all know me by Manny Fresh, Elvis Freshly, Manny Glover, Manny Savas Jr. and Nary Third. Can you first tell me about the aha moment that led to Vax that thing up? It actually was part of a project that we were working on with BLK, a Black Dating Act that's owned by a match group. We were doing a brand campaign refresh for them and in that process, we were working on what that campaign idea was. We were already working around the vaccination with the White House. We released the Vaxify badge and the app. So we just said to them, you know, if you have any ideas on how we can amplify our messaging around helping the community get vaccinated. One thing that we knew is that the Black community overall were reluctant to adopt the vaccine for obvious reasons, right? Historical issues that have made them reluctant to take on any sort of medical advice from a government in particular that doesn't have a good track record for doing the Black community any justice. I feel like we have a deeper responsibility than a Gen Pop Dating Act to the community that we serve. Last year, with the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, Brown and Taylor, countless others, Amad Aubrey, all the other companies who saw standing in solidarity with the Black community but know we are the ones who've been standing. With that being said, we thought, well, we're a dating app still. And in that, we really needed to find the right role to talk about vaccines in the community. Literally, it was a deck over a hundred pages and there was one slide about Vaxify on like the second to last page of the deck. And we thought this idea of like, what if we remade this cult classic, an important song in the Black community that everyone knows within the first few beats of the song and we made it into Vax that thing up? And we were like, hmm, that could be interesting. So we sat on it, let the executive team see it and like literally three days later, we were like, let's pull the trigger on this. Before I license any of my music out, I'm kind of cautious about something that I believe in. And I kind of felt like with the Black community, like we're not getting the message. So why not music? Why not something like that? I knew first thought offhand, it was going to be some backlash for it as well. It was going to be good and bad. Especially with a topic like this, there's who do we offend, who do we not offend? So there were a couple of like elements that we had to really think about and even pursuing the final creative. For us, the original vision probably was a little bit more in the vein of a Saturday Night Live sketch. I think as we went down the path of taking it from a mock press release on a single slide into an actual piece of content, one rule that we try to follow is when you're parodying something, parody it as close to the original as possible so that people know and get the full effect of the source material. What was the pre-production process like? What was this kind of several week Rubik's Cube of figuring out multiple contracts and figuring out rights to the song, recreating the lyrics and all of the legal implications of that? First thing they wanted to do, we went through a whole bunch of artists like, you know, and I was just like, no, it's got to be something I kind of tell the city. What we learned from Juvenile and from Manny Fresh, which we didn't know going in, New Orleans was hit particularly hard by COVID. And so this was a issue that was very close to both artists' heart as we started to approach the actual record date in New Orleans at Trombone Shorty Studios. The third artist was still missing. We know we wanted a female artist. I started throwing out a few names and I threw out Mia X and Manny kind of just almost across the room was like, oh, Mia, hold on. He gets on the phone, calls Mia. Without second guessing, Mia was like, I'm in. And within five minutes, Mia was at the studio. The way the lyrics came together, the first verse, it kind of flowed naturally. And then Juvenile essentially kind of came in and took it from an 8.5 to a 10. The second verse was incredibly collaborative with Manny Fresh and there were several versions of it. Now the third verse, for us, this became a perfect kind of opportunity to create the rallying cry, to go and get the shot and be incredibly overt with that message. Okay, what rhymes were shot? I actually kind of threw out like, man, what if I was just about hooking up with some dude named Scott? Like, I think that's actually it. When we saw it start to come together with the lyrics, I was like, let's do what we can do here. Let's make it, let's do our job, which is to make an authentic rap video and bring that, their vision to life. So now here it is, we get to work with the artists that we grew up watching that motivated us to be in this industry. It was definitely nostalgic. I love that they did the shots iconic to the way it was. Like making it rain with the Vax cards. It's a classic visual of hip-hop in that time period. We wanted to make sure that we hit on those points of touching on the original video. So just scouting parks, we were like, oh, West End Park, this is perfect. It has that overhang over the basketball courts, which is what they had in the original video. Even on set, you know, when you and I was like, this is gonna be funny, man. People are gonna love this. You will be turned to me and say, you think we should just like maybe shoot the old one again. This really feel like the, you know, the video, like the first way we did it. We definitely made sure that, you know, whatever we did, we had the elements in it, you know, so far as like the girls on the cage, the twerking, the fog, even the angles, the way we introduced them, the way we framed them up was making sure that they were larger than life, because that's how we saw them anyway. These are legends and icons. Looking at the whole thing, like B.L.K. being an app of connection, this is the first time in history, music history, that no limit record artists have officially collaborated with cash money record artists ever. And all together in that one master shot where we're circling them, and that was like what we ended on, and it ended on such a high note. In that moment, I realized, I was like, it represents no limit. Like, wow, like, so yeah, this is iconic. By the time we finished, it looked like the original video. Like it was just people who found out we was out there, and it was a whole park full of people. It ended up almost being a block party. That was definitely a party. And then, you know, from the post-production and then the release of it, it just like blew up. Overall, between social media, broadcast, we saw over 6.8 billion media impressions. It was on TV, the stage shows, CNN, it was everywhere. I think we knew that industry-wide this was gonna be something that was going to be of conversation and also in culture, because that was the intention. So we hope for that. But I was shocked by some of the tweets by celebrities, for John Legend to say that it's the song of the summer. That was amazing. Medical professionals, health professionals, they were retweeting it and supporting it. We even saw people commenting saying that because of this video and the song, they are gonna get vaccinated. So we did change some lines, so that's always good.