Over the Christmas holidays I noticed a Hyundai commercial with a young, pretty, guitar playing, singer. Intrigued by the sound and curious if she was really playing that guitar or just an actress faking it, I did a bit of Goggling and found Jessica Frech.
Turns out Jessica is quite the YouTube sensation. She’s a 20 year old college sophmore at Belmont University in Nashville majoring in song writing (yes, she was really playing that guitar). She put words and music to a series of images from the web site http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/ and in no time at all, it went viral (over six million hits to date). An astute ad exec saw The People of Walmart video and convinced Hyundai to let her write, produce, and star in her own Hyundai commercial. In fact, she did two of them!
Shortly after that she partnered with a company called Kickstarter.com, which specializes in finding backers for projects. Jessica’s project was to produce an album of songs she’d written. She needed $8,000 – she raised $29,000 (she has quite a following on her YouTube channel). Those who contributed in the financing of her album were rewarded with items such as signed CDs, signed posters, and props used in some of her other YouTube videos. For her largest backers, she agreed to write a song or company jingle (this is where I got really interested).
We jumped in with both feet and are anxiously awaiting the master version of our song – (hint: senior portraits at Newsome’s). I know Jessica has a large following on YouTube, and most of her followers are likely closer to her age than mine (although they really do span many decades), but I’m curious how many of my readers/clients have already heard of her. So, please, let me know by completing the poll below, and feel free to comment on how or where you first saw her. Her album “Reality” was released on iTunes last week and I can tell you now that she is destined for stardom. If you don’t know her yet, you surely will very soon!
