How Mobile Works for the Grammy’s
The question is: How do we get people to care more about the Grammy’s?
One major issue is that the Grammy’s don’t have a season, they only have a single event that celebrates the year of music.
So how do they get people to tune into the event instead of the YouTube performance bootlegs?
The recording academy is actually a fairly conservative and traditional organization.
The marketing team was challenged three years ago to become thought leaders in the digital space. They’ve built a big hungry digital machine that needs feeding all year long.
Last year, they created a campaign called “We’re all fans,” built exclusively from user-generated content. Everyone opted in to upload their content without knowing how it would be used.
They launched it online three days before the event, and millions responded.
This year, the bar was set high because of that social success. So they built off the shared social experience: we all have a story punctuated by these musical moment. Everyone has a muscal journey that culminates at the Grammy’s.
How do you allow people to map this journey? Get in front of the behavior. Include geolocation and mobile.
From an artist standpoint, they picked a handful of popular artists that have an interesting journey worth telling.
They added a QR code in the campaign to push it across the line. It’s an opportunity to engage people at depth with the campaign.
They created the MusicMapper app that allows you to drop a pin in a location and associate that location with a piece of music. You can write a story about it, and add that as well. Then you can browse all the other journeys happening in any mapped area.
They cleared 10 performances that have never been seen outside of tv and streamed them via the app directly through the device.
Because of the blurred lines of social and mobile, they also created a desktop app with Adobe air and a microsite: allowing the audience to engage where they’re most comfortable.
The app spread internationally.
They wanted the app to be viral, but knew that wasn’t enough. So it was supported on TV with spots during the nominations show on CBS.
They also engaged with their key artists to build initial content and get the fans of those artists to engage in those journeys through the app.
So they also ran an Eminem spot, where they’re animating all the objects of that journey and making it come alive for a broad reach audience.
They also supported it online through partnerships and content written through no less than 15 different sites.
Results:
3% viewership increase, up 4% in adults 18-49 to 26.7 million viewers. This is telling them that the mobile / social strategy combined with the televised event is working.
Certainly follows the Forrester insight at the consumer forum that Consumers want to interact with the brand over multiple devices.
