Farah Vintage

Music has always been a key part of Bounce’s work over the years, from our W3 Silver Award winning website for key music retailer Pure Groove to our much acclaimed DeezerMusicWall app and installation for streaming service Deezer, which collated hundreds of nominations for people’s favourite songs and converted them into art (see previous post), which could then be viewed through the DeezerMusicWall Facebook channel.

And our music related work continues with a new project for one of our regular clients Farah Vintage, which we’ll be assisting on a major London party. Headlined by one of the biggest new bands of 2012, Tribes, and being held in a secret East London location on November 28th, it’s all to celebrate a highly successful Citizens of Farah campaign, which Bounce ran for the brand during 2012.

The project worked around two Facebook apps, which connected its audience with a series of art and fashion-based ‘ambassadors’ including fast-rising DJ Daniel Avery, who’ll be cementing his relationship with the brand by playing the closing party. It also allowed the public to become ‘citizens’ of the brand by submitting photographs to become models for the 2012 advertising campaign, which was shot by renowned photographer Gavin Watson.

 

Bounce will be working across both digital and experiential for the closing party, with a social media and app campaign being used to drive traffic via a VIP ticket giveaway, and we’ve also helped curate both the main event line-up and a early evening preview event in Farah’s mini-store in the Boxpark mall in East London. We will also be involved in creating content during both events, which will be used as a regular editorial source for the brand’s social channels and website.

If you want a chance to win tickets to see Tribes, Daniel Avery, Mark Jones from Wall of Sound and excellent London DJs Get Some, then head to the Farah Facebook page for your chance to win tickets.  

Work smarter

We’ve been working with the good people at ITV Commercial recently on a number of projects, the centrepiece of which is a beautifully useable tool to guide the way in which their sales teams tackle the pitch process.

Triumph! is designed in HTML5 to come to life on iPad and behave just like an app, while still being accessible in a browser. It’s perfectly at home on the team’s trusty iPads.

It ensures a coherence and quality to their output by guiding teams through a strategic, creative and pitch process - giving them the tools to make key decisions along the way and to organise successful creative sessions, initiate pitch theatre and so on.

The centerpiece is a set of sliders which enable users to define brand objectives and audience sentiment in order to output a clear strategic objective for their brief.

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The team at ITV Commercial are already creating seriously head-turning pitches following the Triumph! process and we’ve worked with them to make bespoke digital experiences for their prospects.

To help talk to potential sponsors for the channel’s crown jewel, Coronation Street, we developed an interactive map, bringing 52 years of the UK’s favourite fictional street to life

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We’ve learned a lot working on the project and have been really impressed by this approach to management of internal working culture. It avoids the heavy-handedness of many typical internal processes - making things interactive and creative, while encouraging staff to develop a house style and quality that’s recognisable to their clients and prospects.

We hope to be working with more businesses in this way in the months to come.

Perils of the new marketing

When Portishead’s Geoff Barrow was invited by Red Bull to take part in their long-running Red Bull Music Academy event, he took to Twitter to wrestle out his conflicting instincts on brand endorsement. And it turned into a fascinating series of exchanges, principally between Geoff and Dublin-based street art curators, Anewspace. 

Here’s the edited version from Twitter:

Now, this is clearly a lesson in what can and will go wrong with brand-sponsored creative activity when artists and other public figures get involved in branded initiatives with blurred creative/corporate borders. But it also demonstrates how exposed brands now are to powerful personal channels; that they have to expect their business undertaking to leak out into the social forum.

It’s a shame the surface view of this reflects negatively on what is largely a beacon of positive, creative and genuinely passion-fired marketing and Red Bull should respond on this and defend their stance. We expect the position adopted by Anewspace in the debate is in the minority and that most artists want to find positive ways to work in the brand economy to collaborate and turn marketing energy towards building things that their audiences care about.

The lesson for us is not to pack this stuff up and recommend another endorsement contract be drawn up with Mark Ronson but rather to acknowledge how far the brand’s commitment needs to go in this space. Enter into this kind of work ready and able to defend your role. There’s no hiding behind the message any longer.

Make Things People Want

A really nice view of the fundamental changes taking place in communications as audiences are impacting and influencing brands, from the Smithery blog. As usual, the prospect of truly useful and loveable communications products is mouth-watering for anyone interested in making good things. Frustratingly, though, there still seem to be so few great examples in the realworld - same ones coming up again and again.

More Ctrl

We soft-launched the latest version of the long-running Topman Ctrl platform this week. Over the next month, as increasing functionality rolls-out, it should become clear that this is neither your average brand entertainment platform nor your average web music destination. But first, here’s Radio 1 new music sage Huw Stephens – who’ll be steering the Topman Ctrl ship alongside his guests this year – to give a little intro:

What’s so exciting for us about this project is the way in which the format brings down the walls between destination site and social media, between artist and fan, between social content and traditional media.

Instead of managing a few digital destinations we are trying to blow open as many of them as possible and create content touchpoints in every corner of the web and beyond. Far from creating chaos though, we will be following an iterative approach and locking in a strategy that emerges around the ones that work best for our objectives.

Creatively we wanted to grow Ctrl’s position as a ‘filter’ for musical discovery keeping it at the forefront of this kind of brand music proposition – Ctrl is an original and has to stay a few strides ahead as more and more brands jump into this arena.

We believe this is something that audiences can care about, love using and that brings real value to their world. If you agree, check in with www.topman.com/ctrl and join us next month when the adventure begins.

thisis MY jam

We’re clearly now into something of a social long-tail in which every possible niche interest an audience might build a community around is being investigated by eager digital entrepreneurs. Led primarily by mobile community media sharing, location data and other possibilities of the zeitgeist, it is rare that a service emerges here that’s driven by primary computer interactions. The music sharing service This Is My Jam is a bit of an exception and it has proved impossibly sticky in the Bounce offices since its Beta launch a few months back.

On the face of it, there’s not much to it - pick a track weekly (or daily for those heavy-users) and TIMJ will serve it up from a streaming source somewhere on the Interwebs (invariably YouTube) and share it with your ‘followers’ with or without your clipped commentary on the selection.

And that’s precisely why it works so well.

Whilst we get overwrought about the invasive (un-sociable) implications of Facebook’s frictionless sharing - TIMJ is focussed on a very considered, very personal sharing selection. Like Twitter - whose simple social infrastructure it follows - it enables a type of social interaction that introduces you to new people who share your (in this case very-focussed) passions. Rather than connecting you to old school friends and people you might enjoy a better social interaction with down the pub.

Yup, this is the long-tail and TIMJ may yet prove to be a ghetto for music snobs but there are some important lessons for anyone in this space; indeed, anyone that wants to capture an audience with online media content:

1. Simple is beautiful - as yet there is no flab hanging off this service, the legacy of previous pivots not yet subject to the ruthless axe of form and function.

2. Choice - we think it really matters. Isn’t sharing fatigue the only logical conclusion of automated ‘frictionless’ sharing?

3. Passion and discovery - want to build a tight community that loves your product? Let them congregate around something they really love. One really nice thing about TIMJ is the daily playlist it provides, compiled by people whose taste you trust.

4. Refine a behaviour - services don’t need to reinvent the wheel in this environment. We were already jamming YouTube clips on our Twitter accounts years ago but having a place to go do it amongst the likeminded entrenches the behaviour, makes it feel special.

To return to the point about mobile - this is something TIMJ are obviously working hard on and the experience is always improving. But how many streaming music experiences can you point to that are worth bothering with on mobile? Once it’s bought up and integrated into one of the big streaming services and the tracks loaded into your lockers, the story may be a different one.

But then, what happens to the bloody catalogue?!

Try it out: www.thisismyjam.com

A month on Twitter #5

If you’ve been following the year-in-review pieces flooding your Twitter feed in the last week, you’ll agree it’s been quite a year and 2012 holds no shortage of thrills yet to be uncovered.

But it’s not our aim here to review the year, although we do offer our pick of the 2012 previews. Instead, we focus on just a couple of issues that arose over the last month on the Bounce Twitter feed that shed light on some of our key things to watch in 2012. Firstly, the emergence of reconfigured cultural products (in this example - films) as they evolve in our two-way media culture. Secondly, we consider the evolution of ‘sharing’, as we grapple with Facebook’s redefinition of the rules with its ‘frictionless’ approach which proposes sharing as a form of always-on life archiving.

Read more

Deezer Music Wall nominated for Econsultancy Innovation Award

We’re very happy this week to discover that our launch campaign for streaming music service Deezer has been nominated for an Innovation Award by the discerning folk at Econsultancy in the category of ‘Innovation in Social Media’. The winners will be announced at the ceremony, taking place at a swanky London hotel on 23^rd of February.

This seems like a timely opportunity to go into the project in a bit more detail with an overview of how things worked. You be the judge as to whether we’re a worthy winner.

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The idea was to draw attention to Deezer with an activity that reinforced their critical differentiator from the music streaming competition – that this is a service by music lovers for music lovers with editorial, human recommendation and more than mere hardcore search-powered tech.

So, we developed a Facebook integrated analogue/digital (which may just be a fancy way of saying experiential/digital) experience encouraging people to share favourite songs and stories to be brought to life in real-time by illustrators working on an installation in London. Essentially, this creative concept brought the Deezer strapline promise – “Where Music Comes Alive” – to life with a perfectly physical, interactive expression of just that.

Built from hundreds of illustrated postcards, the Wall was experienced online through a gigapixel image in which you could zoom into each card and even play the relevant track.

It lives on and you play around with it right HERE.

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1. The real-world experience

Between 19 – 24th October a group of illustrators and a gigapan-operated camera were installed in the Old Truman Brewery, off Brick Lane in East London. Through a Facebook application, audiences shared their favourite songs and the stories behind them. Illustrators turned each of these stories into unique hand-illustrated postcards and added them to the wall. The wall itself grew into both a visual and literal expression of the brand.

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2. The digital interface

Users could view the progress of the wall through a regularly updating gigapixel image that allowed it to be browsed from afar and zoomed into in close-up. As individual cards were selected in close-up, details then loaded in allowing the associated track to be played via Deezer, the track title and user comment to be displayed, and that card to be shared through Facebook and Twitter.

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3. Sharing

With 1000 entries we were able to send Facebook and Twitter notifications when each user entered their track. But the real excitement kicked in when a user’s card was created and added to the wall. At this point we posted to their feed both a packshot and direct link that zoomed elegantly into the gigapixel image within the Facebook app to focus on that individual’s card. These then became the focus for further conversations within Facebook. This turned 1000 entries into hundreds of thousands of impressions across Facebook.

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Brand awareness was achieved both on the ground for a week with a living, breathing brand embodiment in high-footfall Brick Lane, through NME and Facebook advertising and, most effectively, through the sharing across Facebook and Twitter.

A new player was introduced to the busy UK music-streaming market with an exciting, engaging and truly social experience. Complex in behind-the-scenes execution, the user journey itself was beautifully simple and depended only on the demographic’s willingness to express their individuality through music. They were rewarded with a unique, creative and shareable memento which achieved the elusive but highly prized goal of all social marketing: social currency.

The Deezer Music Wall on Facebook

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The Deezer Music Wall on Monday lunchtime