Who launched headphones brand Beats by Dr Dre in 2006? Millennials would immediately respond, ‘the rapper, obviously!’. Gen Z? That’s a sea of blank faces staring back at you.

?No longer able to rely on recognition of its iconic figurehead for relevance, the brand was struggling to connect to Gen Z — an audience driven by authenticity and creativity. So with its new self-expression-friendly, colourful Powerbeats Pro headphones due for global launch, our challenge was to help Beats meet this young audience on their terms.

The objectives of this campaign were manifold, complex, and exciting! The first was to drive relevancy with Gen Z. The second was to improve brand awareness for Beats. The third aim was to use music to celebrate colour, self-expression and creativity. And last but absolutely not least, to drive wide-scale awareness of the collaboration between singer Ashnikko.

Our insights showed that Gen Z isn’t interested in commenting and sharing branded content; they want to make their own. They also don’t want to follow brands: they want to join them. How could we convince Gen Z to connect with the Beats brand? By challenging them to co-create alongside Beats on their favourite platform: TikTok.

We teamed up with made-on-TikTok star Ashnikko to create the world’s first music video made with Tiktok user-generated content for her latest song ‘Daisy’. We used the colours of each Beats release as inspiration for the different creative Hashtag Challenges: Glacier Blue, Spring Yellow, Cloud Pink and Lava Red. To drive widespread engagement and participation, we worked closely with Beats By Dre to activate content creators in each of the target markets. The creators encouraged audiences to participate whilst also securing brand visibility through product placement and key campaign hashtags.

A key strategic component was the pyramid of talent used. We collaborated with outstanding creative TikTok influencers from the UK, USA, FR, DE and RU, all chosen from TikTok’s top categories – music, sports, fashion and gaming – as most relevant to Beats and Gen Z.

For the campaign launch, all talents took part in the “Blue” challenge. For the remaining weeks, we focused on different markets with UK talents interspersed throughout. This allowed us to effectively saturate the target demographics of each challenge whilst maintaining a global presence.

All creators chosen had to satisfy Beats By Dre’s key pillars to ensure alignment with their brand values. This included being inspirational to youth communities, showing resistance to the status quo, and amplifying the voices of minority communities. These criteria inspired a creative selection of talents and allowed us to activate a diverse array of communities from around the world.

We worked with a total of 26 creators to create 52 pieces of content, amassing a cumulative following of 58.9 million at the time of posting.

Ashnikko set TikTokers a fresh weekly colour challenge over four weeks — themed to the new Powerbeats Pro colours — and invited her audiences to make response videos based on their interpretations of the colour challenge using hooks from her latest track. Our influencers shared their own creations and invited their own audiences to participate after each colour challenge drop.

The hashtag views grew at an incredible rate; millions of people from this notoriously hard-to-reach audience didn’t just view content, they made content in response. With native speakers from each market, we communicated with talents clearly and effectively throughout the campaign, ensuring that all content followed the strict requirements and guidelines of usage for a potential feature in the official music video.

The campaign drove unprecedented reach and engagement for Beats, with 2.2 million user-generated videos uploaded using the hashtag #BeatsDaisyChallenge within the first three weeks of the campaign, plus 946 million global engagements (likes/shares/comments). And to top this off, the #BeatsDaisyChallenge hashtag page received a staggering 8.1 billion views in the first month of the campaign going live.

We can also calculate our influencers' direct engagements, which came to a total of more than 34 million views. We had a global engagement rate of 14.66% (weighted average) on branded content in terms of interaction.

Taking views and engagement rate as our primary KPIs, this campaign exceeded goals by 126% (influencer content only), with additional earned content pieces from creators.