To help make their sponsorship of The London 2012 Olympics Games more relevant to teens, Coca-Cola decided to show a different, more social side to the Olympics by creating an anthem out of the sounds of sport. Music producer Mark Ronson was commissioned to make the track, and was filmed for a documentary as he travelled round the world meeting athletes and recording the sounds of their training. To integrate into this activity, we invited teens to join in and create their own version of the track out of their own movement, too, with the My Beat Maker app.

The My Beat Maker app lets you make music just by moving your smartphone.

You choose a background rhythm, select a sound, and move your phone to trigger it.

Holding the record button adds it to your 16-beat loop. You can layer up to six sounds – sports samples, synths and vocals. For more creative possibilities, turning the phone on its X&Y axis brings in a delay or phaser effect. And a musical algorithm makes sure that you can’t go wrong so your loop always sounds tight and on the beat. Teens were invited to share their loops online with their social networks and on the ‘Global Beat’, a desktop website where everyones’ beats were mashed together - with beats made on Facebook too – to create the biggest musical collaboration of all time. Users who came to the Global Beat via Facebook were also invited to download the app.

The app launched close to the deadline, so we don’t have full results as far as consumers are concerned. However, it has been received very positively with the client Coca-Cola, with 49 markets choosing to launch the app in their territory. The idea of creating your own 16-step personal beat also inspired the rest of the digital activity - the aforementioned Global Beat came from this original mobile concept.