Branded entertainment is exploding in the U.S. as marketers endeavor to mitigate advertising avoidance by reaching consumers through shared passions and values. The most popular approaches are product integration into TV shows or movies, licensing deals with musicians and curated content or experiences. The transactions are simple: A brand pays to be associated with an entertainment property and leverages it to appeal to its audience.

But there’s a stark difference between co-opting culture and creating it. Our challenge was to breakout of the clutter of wireless speakers to earn Ultimate Ears the attention of young, fickle music fans. So we developed an original comedy series powered by their new wireless speaker, UE BOOM that would capture the imaginations of these fans and rekindle their love for listening to music out loud.

By teaming up with the YouTube Comedy Channel JASH to launch The Social Music Experiment, we were able to develop the series around the brand’s themes. We selected the artists. We contrived the comedic experiments for testing the power of music. We flipped the model from brand as sponsor to brand as programmer. And at the end of it all, we owned the idea.

We wanted to become part of culture, so The Social Music Experiment was launched as a legitimate comedy series. It was announced on Jimmy Kimmel Live! with our talent, comedian Reggie Watts, appearing on late night to plug the new show. Then it launched exclusively on YouTube’s comedy network JASH and was syndicated on CollegeHumor.com for a wider release. We also partnered with SPIN to bring the series to the Bonnaroo Music Festival reaching even more music fans.

Publicity trumped paid media as music and entertainment journalists promoted the series with more credibility than we could have through advertising.

The Social Music Experiment was Ultimate Ears’ first successful foray in branded entertainment. Every piece of the program was designed to maximize Ultimate Ears’ engagement with young music fans. The series was syndicated across a variety of comedy websites, including CollegeHumor.com and YouTube’s Comedy Network JASH. Within the first three months, 5 million people watched 230,000 hours of branded content, introducing the speaker to millions of music fans. The series earned 120 million media impressions from press coverage in entertainment outlets like Huffington Post, VICE, IFC, CRAVE, SPIN and earned the brand an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Series viewership and PR exposure drove 5x increase in monthly unique visitors to UltimateEars.com and shifted our search traffic from 100% paid search to 71% organic search.

We also brought the series to the largest music festival in the country to film an episode amongst the 90,000 fans that attend Bonnaroo. Not only did we engage with artists and fans on site, but the series made it into 18 music outlets’ festival wrap-up coverage of notable things that happened at Bonnaroo 2013. Finally, the series anchored a launch campaign that catapulted Ultimate Ears from 0% to 5% market share in 6-months.