Cannes Lions

"What Do You Mean?" by Justin Bieber Single Release Campaign

SB PROJECTS, Los Angeles / SB PROJECTS / 2016

Case Film

Overview

Entries

Credits

Overview

Description

The creative idea for the campaign was a 30 day countdown to the release of the single by means of countdown content disseminated every day solely through the social media channels of our client leading up to the release. Each day, we would commission a close friend, colleague, collaborator, or influencer who had been an important part of our client's story to create a piece of content signifying the amount of days left until the single release. Creative freedom for the content would be left to the individual contributing; it could be a picture, video, song, dance etc and these would be sent to our client and team and disseminated on our client's social channels for publishing.

Execution

The execution began with the initial radio host where the campaign was announced creating a video and picture indicating 30 days to release. Every day our client and team would request a new person to participate in the content creation and we would publish on our social channels for that day. We originally intended to publish 30 pieces of content signifying each day with a different participant. However, as the campaign grew, we were receiving multiples of content from so many sources that it became a movement where we were posting 3 or 4 different pieces of content with different influencers each day. This culminated into about 3x the amount of anticipated content approaching nearly 90 different posts and 77 different celebrities all conveying the message of the single release to their respective audiences.

Outcome

The outcome was spectacular. The social impact on Twitter alone reached 547.9M impressions, 68.5M engagements at an engagement rate of 12.3%, our hashtag had 9.5M retweets, 503K replies, 10.3M favorites. Total tweets for #WhatDoYouMean: 8.5M and days countdown #XDAYS: 6.8M for a total of 37.5M tweets. Instagram analytics for the campaign saw 123M engagements, 1.8M comments, and 121 million likes. The resulting impact on the single was undeniable. The song broke the global record for most Spotify streams in one week with over 41 million streams. It immediately shot to #1 in over 75 countries on iTunes, eventually reaching 90. It was Justin’s first #1

on the Billboard Hot 100 the first week of release, first #1 on the Top 40 Pop Songs airplay chart. #1 in his native Canada, and became his first #1 UK national chart hit as well.