Being ethical and defining what it means for our business might not be an option anymore, but a necessity to stay relevant in the new, fragmented marketplace.
Heartbeats International gives you a whitepaper on Brand Ethics. This whitepaper is a call for those of us working with branding and marketing, to lift focus from consumer needs for a while and examine our own practice, how our everyday work actively contributes to society.
Footwear company Converse is well-known for its projects focusing on art, music and culture. This time they pay tribute to influential musicians by promoting indie music genres with street art.
Recently Converse partnered with graffiti collective Monorex to paint the city walls of the UK, paying tribute to influential British musicians such as Bernard Sumner and Paloma Faith, amongst others. London, Brighton, Manchester and Glasgow are getting their murals done.
Converse also got indie artists to record four versions of the song Didn’t Know What Love Was. As well as that, they are putting on a series of free parties throughout the UK. The parties take inspiration from iconic genres of British music, from punk to Britpop to dubstep, with support from Vice.
Homeland Security have expanded their operations and besides terrorists they are now chasing music blogs as well. Even if quite a few record label executives might feel inclined to stick the T-label on the bloggers, this is still a change of pace for the war on copyright infringement.
We initially intended to cover this when it happened a few weeks ago, but due to unclear circumstances and uncertainty concerning exactly what legal room Homeland Security operated under, it got temporarily shelved.
This is still a very important issue for everyone who’s working professionally with music, so please take the time to read this article in New York Times, and the statement recently made by Eskay, owner of NahRight, one of the biggest music blogs.
In a previous post, our friends at Splatter highlighted the benefits of brands involved with music festivals. Here they share some advice on how to make the best use of festival funding.
As Splatter mentioned in their previous post on Sounds Like Branding, brands can gain pretty much from being part of a music festival, e.g. engagement, storytelling, sampling opportunities and so forth. It is however up to the brands and their agencies to make the best use of a sponsorship and turn the fans into customers (or customers into fans, as we say at Heartbeats).
The obvious question for a brand wanting to leverage off the passion created by music is: How do they pick through the options and ensure marketing spend is effectively used?
According to Splatter, you should:
1. Ensure that involvement in a music festival or music festivals is a part of a broader music based strategy. The consumers will smell the lack of authenticity if your presence at a music festival (for cool cred) isn’t backed up by relationships with artists, fans, online leverage, great use of music in retail A-T-L that incorporate music in some creative way.
2. Work with a specialist that understands the market place and actually knows everything about the festivals, the music, the fans and the brands. There is a huge difference between the quality of festivals on offer, and you will save time and money by speaking to people that already know.
3. Work with only established events (or at least credible and authentic ones, according to Heartbeats). If a promoter comes to you with a grand idea to run a festival, but they have no history of doing credible events, then be very cautious.
4. Ensure that you have a plan for your participation involving detailed pre, onsite and post event creative, planning and execution. Leverage every step of the way. Get as much access to artists as possible, ensure you can use the festival in your own brand stories, get involved in the pre-event marketing campaign. Do some marketing of your own. Create content during the festival and spread it afterwards. Look for multi-year relationships, so you can build your brand alongside the festival as it grows.
5. Get creative. If you think that slapping some logos around the festival grounds and having hot girrrrrlls in short skirts handing out samplers is all you have to do once you are at the festival, then think again. Creative and useful experiences allied to pre-event participation and continuous conversations can turn festival sponsorship into something truly valuable.
6. Ensure you have pre-agreed metrics so you can measure your investment ROI.
So, which festival would fit your brand you think?
Eric Welles Nyström, who works with artist management and brand consulting for lifestyle companies in NYC, and is a member of Heartbeats Movement, has shared his insights about marketing trends in NYC with us. Read about Eric’s thoughts of shoe brand Keep’s recent marketing campaign, the future of marketing in general and ‘organic’ as a trend, as well as why music is becoming more and more important to reach the target consumer.
In this post, our friends at Splatter have taken a look at 2010’s hottest phenomena in China, the Music Festival. Below they touch upon what brands can gain from this phenomena. These benefits aren’t exclusive for the Chinese market though, but apply to many other markets.
Until relatively recently, China’s music festivalers were restricted to one option only, Heavy-metal heavy Midi which has been held in Beijing since 1999 and stood alone as the only regular event in China until, in 2007, two new players strode purposefully into town. Aiming at a more attractive (to marketeers at least) “indie hipster” crowd, Modern Sky Records in Beijing launched their eponymously titled 4 dayer, and Splatter’s sister company Split Works launched the Yue Festival in Shanghai, backed by Bacardi and Converse. Since 2007, Music Festivals have erupted in every corner of China, with (rough estimation) around 60 in 2010 and there is more to come…
Festivals are however an expensive game - creating a temporary village for 1-4 days, paying local and national government licenses and then of course artists fees, both international and domestic (domestic artist demands have tripled in the last couple of years due to the increased popularity and demand) - puts festival investments into the millions of RMB (1 RMB is approximately 0,15 USD). On the other hand, you look at the ticket prices of the average festival (60RMB/day) and the average attendances (2,000 – 8,000 – be wary of anyone who claims more, Splatter attend them all), it becomes clear there is a large financial disparity occurring.
How do the organisers make up this shortfall? In China, there are four ways currently:
A local government offers to underwrite the festival (Suzhou Holisland, Zhangbei Inmusic, Zhenjiang Midi Festival) as a way of promoting the town/ district
Sponsorship fees (Modern Sky, YUE, Nokia’s Strawberry in Xi’an)
Real Estate developers offer to host a music festival on their land to attract people to the area and then to hopefully sell them expensive property (Tianjin Dreamvalley, Great Wall Tanglewood)
Promoter funds the festival personally (at Niu Yu Hui near Guangzhou, the farmer whose land hosted the festival, sold his car and laptop in order to pay the bands due to poor ticket sales)
More often than not, festivals are funded by a combination of the elements above (e.g. Zebra Festival, a festival in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, is a joint venture between Zebra Media and the Chengdu Government/Chengdu Media Group and Suzhou’s Holisland was actualy underwritten by local government to draw attention to a new real estate development).
Because of the need for funding, brands and agencies in China are being approached by most, if not all of these festivals throughout the year. But, why would you want a music festival as a part of your branding strategy? Splatter tell their clients that music festivals scratch at least 4 distinctive itches.
First, brands get a great experiential and engagement opportunity to have a deep and meaningful interaction with their consumers. Going to a festival is the most exciting thing most people ever do; this makes them incredibly open minded to messages from sponsors.
Second, brands can use their participation at the music festival to tell a broader story to the media, by buying media and mobilising online communities. Festivals can deliver huge value in terms of PR and marketing when done well.
Thirdly, your brand benefits from increased awareness as well as a positive and often passionate association and alignment with the festival itself and the artists attending.
Finally, there are enormous sampling opportunities, which your target consumer will often pay for! On site, sales can be leveraged, and most experienced brands report substantial increases in sales post event.
Which music festival would fit your brand?
Splatter is a specialist music communications agency based in China. Split Works, Splatter’s sister company, is a Beijing- and Shanghai-based concert promotion agency. Together they maintain China Music Radar, a blog about the Chinese music industry.
Pepsi’s Refresh Project has generated tens of millions of votes and countless tweets and Facebook posts in 2010. Next year, PepsiCo will take it global.
In short: this year Pepsi shunned their US advertising budget for Super-Bowl (of over $20 Million) and decided to put it into social media and the Refresh Project instead. The project has generated tens of million of votes and a countless number of tweets and Facebook posts, and the Pepsi brand itself has reached more than 2.7 million fans on Facebook (a growth of more than one million within in less than two months and still counting).
This fall, marketing director for Pepsi, Ana Maria Irazabal, expressed that “the Refresh Project is helping sales by linking charity in customers’ minds with their feelings about the brand”, and she also expressed that Pepsi will expand the Refresh Project globally in 2011 (The Huffington Post).
The Refresh Project embraces the four Es marketing model and represents a shift away from traditional marketing to marketing with a higher purpose.
When Justin Bieber’s My World Acoustic was released exclusively through Walmart, it was one of many landmarks in his supersonic career that has taken him from webcam sensation on YouTube to one of the biggest pop stars on the planet.
It wasn’t easy though. In spite of a heavyweight co-signer in Usher, the record labels were reluctant to sign an artist without a major platform. In a recent interview with Billboard, Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun explains how the labels told him that Bieber had no way of breaking out through YouTube alone. The common knowledge was that you can’t compete with Disney and Nickelodeon.
In a lot of ways Justin Bieber is a pre-cursor of where we all are heading. Justin Bieber got his break on YouTube, and currently holds the #1 spot on the platform with 400 million views of the music video for Baby. More important than a marquee clip of Baby caliber though, is Bieber’s constant interaction with his fans through lo-fi video messages and tweets.
On a slightly smaller scale the two latest hip hop franchises, Drake and Nicki Minaj, also got their breaks with very little major label backup. Drake’s Best I Ever Had, off his selfreleased mixtape So Far Gone, was an international hit last year. He was the grand prize in a bidding war where Sylvia Rhone and Universal eventually had to back up a very big money truck in order to secure a deal, and he found himself nominated for music awards before he even had an official release out.
Nicki Minaj was featured on pretty much every single remix released for almost a year leading up to her album release. She surpassed 1 million Twitter followers months before her album Pink Friday scored the highest first week sales for a female rapper since Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation of… in 1998.
So do we need to rethink what it takes to break a new franchise artist? What part should the record labels play and is there room for brands to associate with these artists BEFORE they become mainstream? Could Walmart have been an integral part of the Justin Bieber saga in 2008 instead of acting as a mere distribution channel in 2010? If brands are to be a relevant part of music and culture in the future, perhaps they need to step up to the plate and enter the game at an earlier stage?
