A vast amount of time and effort is spent by brands attempting to merge digital and physical marketing techniques. The ways that Spotify has managed to take a step out of it’s digital platform to engage directly with music fans at a festival are explored here. Outlined in this blog are the objectives and tools utilised by Spotify to better-engage with its audience, and the outstanding results they gained on completion of the campaign.
“Branding has become commonplace at festivals, whether in the form of exclusive “naming rights” such as the O2 Wireless Festival, or through the use of numerous co-sponsors and brand partners, suggesting that attitudes to commercialism and sponsorship are changing” (Anderton, 2011).
Spotify began to build a bridge between online customers and music fans attending festivals a few years ago. They have been working for a number of years to organically fuze musically interested festival-attendees with their digital music streaming platform.
Spotify have produced various reports and case studies regarding their work with international festivals. Notably, in 2014, Will Page, Head of Economics at Spotify produced a case study called ‘Adventures in the Lowlands‘ this study explored ‘Festivals, Streaming and Social Media’ offering best practice tips for areas such as integrating data, social media, measuring uplift and surveys.
At Bilbao BBK Live, one of the biggest music festivals in Spain, Spotify teamed up with two event digital technology specialists, Glownet and Yumiwi to produce an interactive campaign like no other. Glownet, who are currently revolutionising the events industry with their high-tech RFID (radio-frequency identification) systems, principally focussed on international music festivals. Yumiwi are a digital engagement company who hone in on utilising data analytics within event/festival marketing activation.
All three of these organisations involved are experts in their fields, pardon the pun, they know music fans, festival-goers and most importantly collectively they know how brands can meet their consumers’ expectations.
Spotify Experience BBK Live 2014 from YUMIWI on Vimeo.
The campaign objectives were extremely demanding (Glownet.com, 2014): Register 3,000 new users, create upwards of 1million impressions, 6,000 likes/comments and at-least 1,000 playlists and photo shares. Although the bar was set high, this didn’t prevent the innovative campaign from over-performing; astonishingly the results actually tripled their original targets.
“47 brand impressions per second”
Overall the BBK Festival campaign was a huge success for Spotify, Glownet and Yumiwi. They managed to gain over 6,700 new customers , 18,000 likes/comments, 4.3 million digital impressions, 3,100 Spotify playlists and 2,300 photos shared via social media. This hyperbole of digital activity ended up creating over 47 brand impressions per second.
The experimental marketing concepts that were jointly delievered by Glownet, Yumiwi and Spotify were made up of various deliverables;
- Selfie-Stand totems that were remotely positioned across the festival site. Customers were able to take selfies and then apply instagram-style filters. Each image had an overlay of Spotify’s logo. By tapping their RFID wristbands on the totem scanners, festival-goers were able to simply upload images to their Facebook profiles.
- Playlist Check-In totems that were emplaced at the festival’s main stages, allowing newly registered customers an opportunity to check-in whilst their favourite acts were playing on stage. Customers could then share the playlist they’d just created via social media, simply by tapping their RFID wristbands on the playlist stations.
- Post-festival, customers received individual customised playlists based on the artists and stages they watched at the event, personalising the experience to each customer.
- Spotify premium accounts, samsung speakers and cameras were all offered as incentives to encourage customers to engage in the campaign. Festival-goers were able to win prizes dependant on the performance and engagement levels achieved by their Facebook posts.
Music festivals are known to be advanced in their digital marketing techniques, according to Mark Walker, Head of Content at Eventbrite.com, “music festivals are leading the way when it comes to paid promotion compared to the rest of the events industry” – see the full article here
Although this campaign seems to have been effective in gaining customer interaction with Spotify, I think it would be hard for other smaller brands to engage with audiences as readily and easily. Spotify are one of the most well renowned music streaming brands to date, therefore engagement levels are expectedly higher than those of lesser known, smaller digital brands attempting to interact with their consumers in the flesh.
References
Anderton, C., 2011. Music festival sponsorship: between commerce and carnival. Arts Marketing: An International Journal, 1(2), pp.145-158.
http://glownet.com/tag/spotify/
http://glownet.com/announcing-glownet-and-yumiwi-partnership/