From dogs on skateboards to endless “how to” tutorials, branded entertainment has been a concern of brands for years now. But in many cases, this simply involves posting film on YouTube or buying views through seeding strategies.

Instead, we applied ourselves to the more pressing question of how to create an interactive music event that would produce great content our audience would love.

Our audience love consuming music online. We made this experience even better through a series of interactive gigs featuring popular acts, streamed live on YouTube from the top of London’s iconic BT Tower. Once broadcast this content could be watched again.

Tickets were won via social competitions, and the online audience was generated through social media including each acts’ Twitter, PR, plus advertising on YouTube.

As the gigs took place, people could interact in real time via social media - even choosing which songs the artists sang. This meant the content got trending and shared through our audience’s own networks.

All targets were exceeded, as we proved that the portion of audience who participated (i.e. watched the gig, interacted with the artist or selected a song) felt much more positive about the brand and more involved with the product. Specifically 40% (3% higher than target) felt closeness the brand and 35% (10% higher than target) were interested in buying next time.

The live response to the events was also extremely positive with over 57,000 people watching the gigs live on the ‘BT Infinity Presents’ YouTube channel; this is over twice the capacity of Wembley Arena. The audience spent on average 19 minutes watching and interacting with the shows, 7,500 users voted live for which song the artist should play and we received over 20,000 tweets during the live shows. Enough to get us trending and reported in the mainstream media.

Post event our content has had over 5.5 million video views and generated 2168 days of brand interaction too.