Help Beats to build a cultural movement from the bottom up, enabling the brand to become a means of expression.
We wanted to create a series of events, campaigns and content that will inspire people to become part of Beat’s self-expression movement. We approached these initiatives from a creative, guerrilla style point of view, focusing on enabling people to use the brand as a means for self-expression, encouraging word-of-mouth and cultural relevance from the bottom up.
We kickstarted with by creating a clever product placement, which led to athletes rocking Beats at the 2012 London Olympic Games – and to a stern word or two from the Games’ organizing Committee.
Beats customized headphones with country flags and invited athletes to try them on and take photos with them in an off-site VIP area.
We created the VIP area as a safe area for Olympians to come and take a journey with the brand. I built an automated, high quality interactive photo boot system, where athletes could create a customized poster with their unique self-expression word and a brand color of their liking. The photo boot took professional photos with an automated DLSR Canon camera and allowed them to retrieve and share their poster online, as well as getting an A3 high resolution printout.
Huge screens across the space showcased created posters at the VIP space in London members’ club Shoreditch House.
Those headphones leaked their way into official Olympic events – either snatched up by eager athletes or, more likely, deftly placed by the brand – and Beats became one of the most buzzed about brands at the Games.
The brand did keep going, building on its Olympic success with #showyourcolor, a social campaign that urged Beats owners to use the headphones as a method of self- expression. through retail executions, experiential events and social media, the brand invited fans to share their colors with the world. they did, in droves: Beats added a staggering 1.7 million Facebook fans over the course of the campaign.
We repurposed the Olympics 2012 Interactive photo-boot system and built it for mobility. As the #ShowYourColor campaigns went online, we sent the photo-boot system on a tour around Europe. The photo-boot was placed in retail spaces, high-profile parties and influencer events at top worldwide cities, including Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York and many, many more.
The amount of high resolution, high profile user generated content was astonishing, saving the brand from spending millions of dollars in content production. A clever move driven by technology and creativity.
One of the epic moments of the #ShowYourColor campaign was a 24-hour takeover of Times Square in New York.
With the interactive photo-boot system at its core, we expanded the platform into six automated photo-boot stations, plus twelve poster customization kiosks. The system was powered by a local server connected to a cloud environment, allowing thousands of people to go through the photo & poster generation platform on that day. Posters were then sent to a moderation dashboard, and from there to dozens of digital billboards on Times Square.
The system was put together in a few hours during the early hours of the day, as the physical structure for the event was being built. A key success point was how we built the system in a modular way, allowing us to have the photo boots, the servers, the poster kiosks and the high-speed printers as a distributed system.
The setup also gave us great flexibility on crowd control, where we could have different batches of people moving from one step to the other, making the process quick and efficient.
Later, we did yet another take over, taking the system back to London and taking over Covent Garden, with the sudden apparition of Dr. Dre himself.
The modular system once again proved to be flexible enough to accommodate different physical setups, coping with taking the high-resolution photos, creating the customized posters, sending the posters to people on their emails and allowing them to share directly on Facebook, as well as getting them physical card printouts.
80% of all premium headphone sales (US, 2012 holidays)
Reach in 180 countries
Helped to propel the brand to be the #1 audio brand
59% share of premium headphone market (2013)
7.29m fans of Beats on Facebook
57% increase in YouTube subscribers
46% teens who plan to purchase Beats for their next headphones 1.47m Number of Beats followers on Instagram
2014 Creative Review Annual Awards – 1xShortlist
2013 NY Festivals – 1xFinalist
2013 Cannes Lions – 1xShortlist
2013 Dadi Awards – 1xWinner, 1xShortlist
2013 IAB MIXX Awards – 1xSilver
2013 Digital Impact Awards – 1xShortlist
2013 SAMMY Awards – 1xShortlist
2013 Lovie Awards – 1xSilver, 1xShortlist
2013 Social Buzz Awards (UK) – 5xShortlist
2013 LIA – 1xFinalist
2013 AICP Next Awards – 2xShortlist
Solutions architecture, tech leadership, development and engineering, events organization, events management, client’s technical liaison.