Market leading personalised radio service Pandora has linked with the Los Angeles Kings NHL franchise on an innovatively tightly targeted marketing campaign called “Be Part of the Pride”.
The Kings, who are the first professional sports team to collaborate with Pandora, are using the multi-platform service to enable fans to create and share digital mixtapes of their favourite King’s related music.
The initiative launched with a set of star Kings players listing thei9r favourite songs. Players including Jack Johnson (not that Jack Johnson), Davis Drewiske, Peter Harrold, Ryan Smyth, Jarret Stoll, Rob Scuderi and Kevin Westgarth supplied Pandora with a selection of their top tracks which were then compiled into a player play list that fans could then add to their own Pandora stations.
The campaign is running both across the Pandora site and mobile app and is aimed at LA based men between the ages of 25 and 49.
Pandora’s mission is to create personalised radio stations to match individual tastes and then deliver matched ad campaigns to a brand’s detailed demographic target. Thus enabling partners/clients like the Kings to connect with the right audience, via either online or mobile platforms, and encourage them to go to the game.
Pandora advertising campaigns currently reach more than 60 million listeners on over 150 devices, including PCs, smartphones, the iPad and in-home connected devices such as televisions, BluRay players, table-top radios and digital media players.
Pandora, which has a mission to give people the music they love anytime/anywhere via connected devices, offers personalised radio stations that can be set up instantly with what it calls ‘a single seed’ (a favorite artist, song or genre). It then applies what it calls ‘The Music Genome’, which is effectively a detailed, musical taxonomy which powers Pandora’s personalisation using musicological “DNA”. To date 10s of millions of Americans are are using Pandora.
“The LA Kings are excited to help create the first sports team-inspired Pandora music station,” said Jonathan Lowe, Kings VP of Marketing. “We are populating the LA Kings mixtape with our players’ favourite songs along with the most popular songs played during our Kings games at STAPLES Center. This partnership with Pandora represents our club’s focus of looking to the Internet and technology to bringing innovative concepts to life, with the ultimate goal of enhancing our fans ability to connect with their favourite team.”
The Kings, which were founded back in the mid 1960s and play in the Staples Centre, have a track record of using the internet and other new technologies to bring innovative concepts to life and enhance their fans ability to connect with the team and its players.
Comment:
With a 60m+ audience, one growing all the time, Pandora, despite being a national radio brand, does seem to have the numbers to provide a locally targeted LA-centric campaign like this. And if it works in Los Angeles, surely other sports franchises will investigate a similar programme.
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