Hasta La Creative!

Does Brian Wilson know who Lorde is? Or why there’s a tiger on his piano?

This lavish video boasts an array of stars performing Wilson’s 1966 Beach Boys classic “God Only Knows” to help launch BBC Music, described by the company as “an ambitious wave of new programs, innovative partnerships and ground-breaking music initiatives.”

Karmarama created the clip, which features luminaries representing various generations and styles. The Impossible Orchestra, as it’s called, features Wilson, Lorde, Elton John, Pharrell Williams, One Direction, Stevie Wonder, Dave Grohl, Jake Bugg, Emeli Sandé, Chris Martin and many more. Kylie Minogue floats in a soap bubble. Baaba Maal rides by in a balloon. Alison Balsom sits perched in a gilded cage.

The extravaganza debuted yesterday during a pan-channel BBC broadcast, and the video’s nearing 800,000 YouTube views already. The song also benefits BBC’s Children in Need charity, is available for download and streaming and was released as a physical CD single in the U.K.

“One of the things that interested me most about this project was the ideas of bringing together so many different styles of music,” says Ethan Johns, who produced the tune. “To make so much diversity work within one piece of music was quite a challenge.”

Naturally, the initiative’s been compared, favorably and otherwise, to other musical megastar team-ups, such as the 1997 Children in Need reboot of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” which was a global smash. (Elton John is only star from that outing to appear in “God Only Knows,” by the way.)

One story in the Guardian brands the new effort as “not quite a perfect day,” noting “There’s something self-aggrandizing about this—but with the amount of music the BBC covers, perhaps it is deserved?” Coverage elsewhere on the site disdainfully notes that “God Only Knows” arrives just as “the corporation’s battle to retain the television license fee [is] getting almost tougher by the week.”

Tough crowd.

BBC Music director Bob Sherman explains the project, and the song choice, thusly: “Everybody gets the significance of ‘God Only Knows.’ And that’s what we’re trying to do with BBC Music. We’re trying to make it feel like it’s an all-encompassing brand for everybody.” That quote comes from the “making-of” clip, in which Queen guitarist Brian May—whose trademark fret runs on “God Only Knows” are a highlight—seems to offer a slightly different take, calling the song “quite enigmatic, really.”

Some view the CGI effects and costumed theatrics as overkill, but I’d say the grand scale fits the message, which is quietly captured in the closing bars of the performance. Wilson sits alone at the piano, sans tiger or bombast, just looking into the camera and singing his brilliant song.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Maude Standish, co-founder and managing director of Tarot, a millennial trend forecasting and strategy development company that’s the sister company of L.A.-based agency, Mistress. Now that she’s introduced herself with her call to arms for millenials, Standish turns her focus to arguably the most talked-about celeb in the past several months and how she’s taken over in terms of branding. We should note that while we’re not in the habit of republishing/repurposing content, the original version of this was published in the blogger section of HuffPo–though Standish did us a solid and added more to the mix. Read on if you will.

Sinead O’Connor is worried about Miley. So is Elton John. So are the bearded guys of Duck Dynasty. But I’m not. Because I know that Miley is a strategic genius and that brands actually have quite a bit to learn from her. You might not like the way her tongue hangs off to the side or the fact that her nipples have become commonplace water-cooler fodder. But you can’t argue with the fact that she has captured the world’s attention and aroused a response out of the best of us.

Before her now infamous MTV Video Music Awards performance, Miley Cyrus had never had a Billboard No. 1 hit—not a single one. In fact the song “We Can’t Stop” that she performed at the VMAs rose to the No. 2 spot, but could never quite break the barrier to be a Golden # 1. Instead, the song that broke that top-spot barrier was “Wrecking Ball,” which came after her controversial performance. “Wrecking Ball” didn’t just break a personal record, she also smashed the record for most views in a single launch day, with the music video getting more than 19.3 million views in just 24 hours, beating One Direction’s previous record by more than 7 million views. Just one week later the video had been watched 36.5 million times in the U.S. alone, Miley’s VMA outfit was being called the Halloween costume of the year, and a line of twerking Miley “bobble-butts” had gone into production for the Christmas season.

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