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

Name	Company	Position
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.