Celebrate the power of music to shape who we are.

Our target user inspired the creative idea. For these people, music is not something they just put on in the background. They use music to feel. They live for the deeper experiences that music unlocks. Alone in their room, headphones on, music and music artists help them connect with their feelings in a profound way. They use music to relax, escape, cry, connect, discover and define themselves.

The creative idea built five intimate portraits of these music listeners and showed the role music plays in defining who they are.

Our heroes were real, diverse, familiar, relatable and endearing. We celebrated them by showcasing how music gives purpose to their place in the world. This idea flexed across all campaign executions from emotional brand statements to hard hitting functional pieces of communication.

Our insight is a deeply personal one. To bring this to life we wanted to build intimate portraits of very diverse listeners.

“Alex’s Theme” showed music’s ability to inspire self-expression for a misunderstood member of the LGBTQ community. “Jaysn’s Theme”, championed the power of hip hop to instill swagger in a teenager challenged by a crew of older youths. “Afsa’s Theme” told the story of a young Muslim woman connected to both her faith and American hip hop culture.

These films combined with product films that explicitly demonstrated the app’s ability to deepen music experiences and out-of-home advertising showcased bold personalities shaped by music. Re-targeted In-app promotion and direct response marketing enabled app acquisition. PR built buzz with editorial in Billboard, i-D, AdWeek and Fast Company, and paid and owned social media amplified the conversation. The campaign ran from July 18th - September 11th 2016.

Our objectives were incredibly aggressive going into the campaign and we over-delivered making this campaign the most effective in YouTube’s history.

Aided awareness grew 22 points (+2pts vs. objective) amongst our target audience.

We doubled our app install run rate to deliver 15MM installs with the campaign. 75% higher in 3 months than we had previously achieved in the 7 months post launch.