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The Madness That United the Internet: How We Dropped the Harlem Shake at BBDO

If you caught the beginning of 2013 in the digital industry, your memory definitely holds this short but absolutely crazy trend. The Harlem Shake burst into pop culture out of nowhere and, for a few weeks, turned the offices of even the strictest global corporations into staging grounds for organized chaos. Naturally, we at BBDO simply couldn’t pass it up.
The formula was brilliant in its simplicity: for the first 15 seconds, a single person in a helmet or mask dances melancholically in a regular, busy office. Then, right after the drop and the phrase “And then the Do the Harlem Shake,” the frame cuts sharply—and the entire room explodes into a wild, absurd dance featuring the most ridiculous costumes imaginable.
For an advertising agency, this trend became the perfect excuse to blow off steam and channel all that accumulated creative energy into pure fun.

• Strategists and account managers, who just five minutes prior were discussing annual budgets and media plans with deadpan serious faces, suddenly unearthed masks, wild wigs, and latex suits from who-knows-where.
• Creators and producers instantly directed this 30-second masterpiece, finding a use for the strangest props that had been gathering dust on studio shelves for years.
• The entire team completely erased all boundaries and hierarchies for those thirty seconds, throwing such a dense, hilarious rave for the camera that the office walls were practically shaking.

Filming it was a whole separate kind of pleasure. It was incredibly tough to hold back laughter during the first half of the video, where you had to look completely unfazed while someone right next to you was making the most bizarre dance moves.
Looking back at those archival clips now, you realize just how cool that era of viral marketing really was. It is a great, vivid memory of a time when trends were born out of pure fun, and an agency could turn into a single, absolutely wild, and happy living organism in just a couple of hours.