Cadbury’s every innovative London 2012 sponsorship activation clocked up another first this week when it became the first brand (alongside Pepsi Max) to air a Shazam-enabled advert on the UK TV.
Running during Simon Cowell’s ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ final on Saturday evening (12 May), the official Olympic treat sponsor and the Pepsi brand became the first advertisers to use the mobile music tagging app with their adverts.
Those TV viewers who have downloaded the Shazam app on their smartphones could simply use it to interact with the Shazam-enabled commercials.
Cadbury’s ‘Unwrap Gold’ spot, which has been airing since late April, offered viewers the chance to use Shazam to win a London 2012 Opening Ceremony package as part of its wider Unwrap Gold campaign.
The ad, devised by Drum and brokered by PHD, asked viewers to take part in a competition by using their Shazam apps to identify the song being played. During the spot, the Shazam logo appears with the message “Shazam for bonus content.”
Participants were then taken to a campaign site where they could unwrap a virtual Cadbury chocolate bar to see whether they have won tickets to the Olympic opening ceremony this summer.
Clare Tasker, head of consumer marketing for London 2012 at Cadbury said the brand wanted to replicate the success Shazam-enabled commercials had in the US and tap into the application’s 10 million user-base.
“As a brand we needed to appeal to younger consumers to stay competitive. We’ve been allowed to do some really innovative work with our marketing around the Games to achieve this,” said Tasker.
“The campaign is about making people feel a part of the Games. We’ve used our Olympic activity to experiment with different things such as Shazam, Blippar (see previous case study) and Google+ and experiential activations to help inform future strategies.”
The campaign is the latest part of the confectionery brand’s ‘Unwrap Gold’ on-pack ticket giveaway promotion for this year’s Olympic and Paralympic Games. The activity appears on 18 Cadbury products including; Cadbury Dairy Milk, Wispa Gold, Boost Duo and Twirl Bites.
The on-pack promotion, entitled Unwrap Gold, is offering consumers the chance to win one of hundreds of London 2012 ticket packages if they find an exclusive golden voucher inside specially marked packs. Additionally, consumers have the chance to win one of a thousand prizes a day by entering their wrapper code online.
The campaign was launched with a celebrity-led bash in Shoreditch and the limited edition promotional packs, which arrived in-store on 2 April, feature golden graphics signposting the product.
Consumers lucky enough to find a golden voucher in their pack are instructed to call the promotional telephone number highlighted to find out which ticket package they have won.
The promotion is supported not only by this innovative Shazam-powered ad, but also by a substantial marketing campaign that ranges from TV, outdoor and press, to radio, social media, PR and online.
The other first-of-a-kind ad, Pepsi MAX’s new 2012 football advert ‘Crowd Surfing’, featured the option to use Shazam to win tickets to summer festivals and unlock other prizes, free screen savers and merchandise. The spot, which starred Didier Drogba, Frank Lampard and Sergio Aguero, also linked to iTunes so that fans could download the ad’s soundtrack – Calvin Harris Let’s Go.
The two campaigns followed ITV’s partnership deal with Shazam, signed last month, that saw the country’s main commercial terrestrial channel become the exclusive UK distributor for Shazam functionality in British broadcast advertising.
Viewers can now use the audio-recognising application to enter competitions, get additional information about a brand or download free music.
“The Britain’s Got Talent final is TV at its most engaging and we are really excited to have secured Cadbury and Pepsi as the first brands to give UK viewers the chance to engage deeper with their spot adverts using Shazam,” said ITV multiplatform controller Stephen Poole.
Comment:
This is a great way for a sponsor to use the second screen around event TV and really connect with viewers/consumers. It looks to be a clever new approach and could prove particularly effective at engaging with younger, technology-savvy consumers.
This new technology partnership is now rolling out international after the success of its large-scale experimental’ debut at this year’s Super Bowl in the US.
During America’s most watched annual TV event, Shazam linked around half of the game’s advertisers to songs by artists who performed during the halftime show, car giveaways, and other additional content in its first major live network television event.
One spot saw Shazam again work with Pepsi’s Super Bowl campaign which aalso promoted its sponsorship of the US version of the X Factor. Fans who used Shazam to tag a Pepsi commercial during the big game got access to a music video by X Factor winner Melanie Amaro.
This audio tagging has led to “record engagement with American football fans tagging content millions of times during the game, the half-time show. Thus far, in the US between 60% and 90% of viewers are clicking through to entering contests or watch bonus content.
While we expect to see much more of this kind of synchronised second screen collaboration in the future, the downside risk is that such active ‘second screening’ initiatives will draw attention away from the more passive main screen content.
However, Evan Krauss, EVP of ad sales for Shazam, argues that the mobile interactions are a less disruptive experience because users can tag and then come back later to enter the contests or consume bonus content.
Shazam has more than 200 million users worldwide, with 65 million in the U.S. and approximately 10 million in the UK. Shazam TV ads are typically based on the television buy, with the company charging between $0.25 and $0.40 CPM on top of the TV impressions. Sometimes, the company negotiates a flat fee, as it did for these campaigns.
It’ll be interesting to see how the trend evolves.
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