Title	THE WORLD'S BEST COVER BAND (ACCORDING TO SHAZAM)
Brand	ALLSTARS
Product/Service	COVER BAND
Category	A06. Original Use of Music
Entrant Company	NIKJOEY.COM Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
Contributing Company 2	NIKJOEY.COM Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
Contributing Company	LAMA LAMA Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS

Name	Company	Position
Nik Sluijs	nikjoey.com	Creative
Joey Boeters	nikjoey.com	Creative
Mark de Vries	Lama Lama	Webdeveloper
Hans Jong	Young Music	Sound Engineer

The Campaign

INSIGHT & IDEA CHALLENGE Dutch cover band Allstars could use some more bookings. They asked us to come up with a smart and cheap idea to promote them. INSIGHT A great coverband should be able to play all kinds of famous songs, sounding just like the original artist. IDEA We came up with a fun experiment: let's prove that Allstars is a great coverband by fooling Shazam (the well known app that recognizes music). Here’s how: Allstars played various famous songs and tricked Shazam into thinking they were the original artists. This makes Allstars The World’s Best Cover Band. Well, according to Shazam. STRATEGY & TARGETING The target audience: potential bookers of cover bands (for parties, weddings, festivals, birthdays etc.). This is a very broad audience, so we wanted to generate as much free publicity as possible. First: By tapping into the popularity of one of the biggest music platforms (Shazam) Second: By doing something that's never been done before. We went for the hacking-the-system approach and decided to fool Shazam. MEDIA EXECUTION Limited by the budget of a cover band, we had to go for a free publicity approach: We created simple and short videos of Allstars playing various songs. Set up in their rehearsal space with an iPhone/Shazam app in front of them. One video for every song we managed to fool Shazam with. We put all the videos on theworldsbestcoverband.com and sent a press release of the project to relevant blogs/media. The project got picked up and shared a lot. RESULTS & EFFECTIVENESS - 40% increase of bookings - 700.000 impressions (website views, blogposts and social media shares) - Allstars was invited to fool Shazam live on national radio 3FM (and nailed it three more times)

Suddenly, people from all over the world were listening to a little Dutch cover band called Allstars: - 40% increase of bookings - 700.000 impressions (website views, blogposts and social media shares) - Allstars was invited to fool Shazam live on national radio 3FM (and nailed it three more times) - Website visitors from 100 countries - Allstars even received supporting messages from some of the original artists they covered

Instead of reaching our target audience through bought media, we created an online video campaign that spread solely on entertainment value. To prove that cover band Allstars is a great coverband, we let them fool the Shazam app into thinking they were the original artist. This resulted in a series of original online videos that were shared organically through blogs and social media.