Title | THE BEATS PILLS |
Brand | BEATS BY DR. DRE |
Product/Service | PORTABLE WIRELESS SPEAKER |
Category |
A10. INTEGRATED CONTENT CAMPAIGN |
Entrant Company
|
R/GA London, UNITED KINGDOM
|
Contributing Company
|
R/GA London, UNITED KINGDOM
|
Credits
Rodrigo Sobral/Tara Greer |
R/GA London |
Executive Creative Directors |
Chris Sullivan |
R/GA London |
Executive Producer |
Iain Robson |
R/GA London |
Executive Creative Director |
Pete Jupp |
R/GA London |
Design Director |
Sanam Petri/Tim Blount/Howard Jordan/Ciaran Mccarthy/Edwin Latchford |
R/GA London |
Associate Creative Director |
Anders Svensson/Andy Bull/Laycee Fan/Jon Ward/Steve Talkowski |
R/GA London |
Senior Visual Designers |
Tyree Harris/Luke Wicker |
R/GA London |
Junior Copywriters |
James Beke/Wilf Eddings |
R/GA London |
Junior Visual Designers |
Vanessa Hoy/Taraneh Koshorowski/Abbey Park/Claire Finn/Souad Setti/Kia Zokaei/To |
R/GA London |
Producers |
Mary Toves |
R/GA London |
Experience Designer/Social Strategy |
Alex Wills |
R/GA London |
Group Director/Content Studio |
Corbett Trubey |
R/GA London |
Senior Copywriter |
Jeff Beberman |
R/GA London |
Art Director |
James Temple |
R/GA London |
Vp/Md/Executive Creative Director/R/Ga London |
Josh Mandel |
R/GA LA |
Vp/Managing Director/R/Ga Los Angeles |
Emily Olson/Lauren Rodwell/Marlina Fletcher/Maria Colorge/Emily Kortlang/Alex Wi |
Beats By Dr. Dre |
The Beats Pills Team |
Erin Sullivan/Cindy Chapman |
Beats By Dr. Dre |
Broadcast Producers |
Chris Waitt/Ben West |
Framestore |
Director |
Ronzo |
Illustrator |
Illustrator |
Seb Robert/Claire Mcgovern/Grace Gordon |
Senior Account Director/Senior Account Manager/Strategy Director |
We Are Social |
The Campaign
Branded Entertainment is on the rise globally, as brands are creating relationships with consumers that are not based on awareness, but on advocacy. Brands are now shaping themselves into charming and valuable agents in people’s lives, creating true social currency. This campaign fit well within all guidelines and regulations regarding both broadcast and online. Branded entertainment is oftentimes a one-way story, with brands speaking at consumers. For the global Beats Pills campaign we wanted to have a two-way conversation with fans of popular culture. And although the Pills was essentially a platform to distribute content, it also became a global conversation about music, sport and popular culture.
Results
Launching in September 2013, the Pills burst onto the scene with a takeover of the MTV Video Music Awards, including contextual online and social media efforts and an instantly-televised reaction to perhaps the most talked-about performance of the year: Miley Cyrus & Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines duet.
The Pills hosted their own live-action celebrity talk show online, animated instantly using a gaming console and the Unity animation engine. The Small But Loud Show was produced with local talent in Beats’ major markets to ensure cultural relevance at a global scale.
And Beats even designed real Pill character holders so fans could bring their favorites home as a cradle for their Pill speakers.
The Pills went beyond the world of music to give Beats a voice in every important pop culture conversation. Timely video content had the Pills reacting to cultural moments on short notice. Contextualized online media gave the Pills a chance to comment on their surroundings on the web. Digital out-of-home executions were contextualized at the hyper-local level, showing Pill characters commenting on their immediate surroundings and neighborhoods, and they made use of dynamic triggering to tie messaging to specific events, dates and local conditions. The campaign was grounded in a constantly-updating social media effort, delivering fresh content with custom-rendered art.
In a competitive wireless speaker category, Beats By Dr. Dre needed to stand out from the crowd and prove that their small Pill speakers were remarkably loud. Small in size, but undeniably vocal, the Pill was a lot like Beats’ young consumer. So Beats created tiny, trash-talking characters with big personalities–and even bigger mouths–to act as official “spokesproducts”.
Through the campaign and tagline, Small But Loud, Beats discovered a powerful voice that resonated more deeply with their target than common marketing-speak, fostering more authentic, more personal connections with the brand than ever before.
At a time when loud culture, loud celebrities, and even loud friends make it hard for any one voice to be heard, the Beats Pills shouted their way into the conversation to the tune of 68.2 million social impressions and 2.2 million social engagements by the end of 2013. Tweets expressing desire for a Beats Pill rose 42%, and Thanksgiving sales rose 222% year-over-year, driving Beats sales to #1 in the wireless speaker category.