We partnered with Imagine Dragons to create the world’s first open source music video. We took the Dragons’ new music video, Believer, and made the entire thing available to the public. Not just the finished video file, but the whole video shoot. All the raw footage. Every shot. Every angle. Every note. We then challenged editors, video creators, and filmmakers all over the world to take it all, Make The Cut, and make it their own, using a free trial of Adobe Premiere Pro.

Over a 25-day period, Adobe, Imagine Dragons and Interscope Records executed a multi-touch program that launched the Make The Cut challenge through our combined social channels, Adobe.com, targeted email, influencer outreach, a microsite, customer support, and event extensions. These included personalized messages from the band, a behind the scenes video from the shoot, and even local editing workshops. The challenge was also localized for priority regions and translated into 11 different languages.

80K downloads of the video footage and 10K full length fan cut video submissions from 28 different countries

677k fans visited makethecut.adobe.com from 160 different countries

Within the 25-day contest period we reached 1.5B fans globally through a targeted array of music, film, entertainment, and industry media

The campaign also blew away Adobe’s expectations of reaching new prospective users with 13K downloads of Premiere Pro, and proved engagement with young creators, with 64% of video submissions coming from 18-25 year old editors

Adobe Make The Cut was one of the most successful brand activations ever for Adobe. And one of the most groundbreaking. The partnership between Adobe & Imagine Dragons resulted in the first ever true open source music video (ALL the raw footage from the video shoot was made available to the public) that activated a critical audience for Adobe. The 80K signups and 10K full length videos created were 5x our target, and resulted in 13K new downloads of Adobe Premiere Pro. In just 25 days the campaign generated unprecedented engagement and acquisition numbers for a highly specialized software program.

Our primary audience was young creators, specifically 18-24 year old editors and video creators. Which overlaps with a significant percentage of Imagine Dragons’ fan base. These young creatives aspire to create great videos, but lack both the tools and the access to great footage enjoyed by seasoned professionals. We knew that if we could give them something exceptional to work with – incredible footage impossible to get through normal means – they’d be incentivized the try an intimidating new tool.

Adobe Premiere Pro is one the most advanced editing and post-production software programs in the world. And while the number of editors and video creators increases almost daily, so do the number of free editing & camera based apps. And while free trials of Premiere Pro would seem to solve this problem, we faced another challenge: many aspiring creatives feel that learning a pro-level editing tool isn’t worth their time, since most of them don’t have access to quality footage in the first place. So we needed to develop a free trial campaign with an irresistible incentive to make a trial worth the effort. So, coinciding with our 25th anniversary, we decided to give the creative community something unprecedented – something that would reward our engaged community of seasoned users, as well as entice that critical next generation of editors.