The Trucks of Country Music
Where the rubber meets the road
People often ask me where to find data for their content. They’re typically looking for a long list of datasets. And these do exist. Here’s one, for example. But I don’t usually generate ideas from this starting point.
I more often discover datasets from other content I see. For example, I’d never thought of using song lyrics as a dataset until I saw ‘The rappers with the largest vocabulary‘.
Later on, we were working with an American tire company who wanted to create content for pickup truck drivers. There’s a whole culture around these trucks, and through our audience research, we knew they had 3 strong affinities – for camping, fishing, and country music.
We also discovered that truck drivers didn’t just love country music, but many country musicians love their trucks too, so much so they sing about them in their songs.
So we wondered… could we analyse the lyrics of country songs to find out which brand of truck gets mentioned the most? Which musicians favour which trucks? And which musicians are most obsessed with their trucks?
It was a pretty simple idea, and it landed right in the sweet spot between the client’s product and the audience’s interests. It was fun to make too!
Unfortunately with this one, I’m unable to share the actual content with you. But I still wanted to share the story.
