FHM: Friday's Hilarious Music: The Sexy Sax Man Sergio Flores.

Sergio Flores is a very talented man, with a remarkable mu-llet and shiny pants. It is very obvious that he is a sax playing superrockgod.
He has taken something quite clever but unremarkable, playing the saxaphone, and turned it into an internet sensation, to the tune of 25 million views on youtube, sponsorship deals and now media spots.

This video went viral back in March / April this year, so to be honest I am way late on the wave, but it is so good that i felt I needed to post and comment before it got lost into the sea of folders on the hard drive. If you haven't seen it yet, take a look, it is pretty spectacular!
Having just watched it again, and gone deeper to get the big picture as I post this, it is proof, that if you have a talent, you can go viral yourself and make a successful career out of it if you have an angle, a rocking bod, some shiny pants and an even better haircut.

This guy is a total super star. There must be more out there.
Right you are, way more out there, and a whole other story....

Sergio Flores - the legend, and the tale of publicity.

Depending on your personal level of youtube saturation, gullibility or whether you watched the video right through to the credits, it may or may not be apparent that Sergio Flores is more than just a character.
The Sexy Sax Man started out as a skit on Saturday Night Live which was then redeveloped by Sergio and his friend Mike Dahlquist to release on Mike's youtube channel that had already had a little bit of action. By a little action just a few million views. However when you look at where they are now, most of that traffic on his channel has come from this one clip.

The clip itself has had an interesting journey. It started out on Mike's main channel, MikeDiva, a year ago and thusfar has had 2.3 million views. This channel has been operational for 5 years, with most of the earlier clips getting between 5,000 - 20,000 views. Then he posted the Sexy Sax Man clip.
All of the clips after that he posted get views in the hundreds of thousands, if not several million. With 156,000 subscribers he has quite the following.

However most of the action came from a secondary channel that he set up under his proper name at the start of 2011. This has the following "behind the scenes" clip, with 865,000 views, and also the legendary Sexy Sax Man clip with 11.2 million views. This move is quite important, but first lets watch the behind the scenes.

The move by Mike Dahlquist to set up a new channel was clever in that it clearly placed ownership of the Sax Man clip on a separate, legitimate channel. His other channel had a lot of more experimental videos on it, and videos of his band, that in all reality would undermine his projected image of a successful. modern film maker. You can clearly see his evolution as a film maker through his first channel which is also quite cool, but trying to promote yourself seriously with the first videos you made and released on the same channel from 5 years ago when you were just a teenager is probably not going to help your cause.

This is the beauty of social media however, you can be who ever you want to be. And multiple versions of it. Mike kind of reinvented himself and used the Sexy Sax man clip as a launching pad to get him to the next level. Whilst his secondary channel just had the Sexy Sax man stuff on it, it did also create an opportunity to direct traffic over to his primary channel so interested parties could learn more.

You can see the lengths this guy will go to when making these videos - it has a tinge of guerrilla marketing to it, watch it to the end it is pretty clever....

Sergio has certainly received his own accolades, his latest project on his youtube channel is the video for his first "official" single available via itunes.

All of this has come from a well executed idea. Nothing special in terms of production, budget or marketing.
Just a great idea, believable performances and a production level that takes it out from the amateur class.

Credits:
Sergio Flores < http://www.youtube.com/user/SergioFloresVideos >
Mike Dahlquist < http://www.youtube.com/user/mikedahlquist >
or Mike's other youtube channel < http://www.youtube.com/mikediva >