Toyota teamed up with web giant Yahoo to leverage its sponsorship of the Stagecoach Music Festival with the first ever live Tumbrl stream.
The live stream, which began on Friday and ran through Sunday, was the first brand-sponsored live stream of a concert on Tumblr (at http://stagecoachlive.tumblr.com/).
The Tumblr video player was built with Toyota branding at the top of the page, and also included a 30-second pre-roll, as well as a set of shorter videos that ran before live stream content began.
Toyota said the livestreams to reach ‘millions’ across the weekend.
The activation saw the festival’s official automotive partner run ads on both Yahoo and Tumblr – including a ‘Tumblr Sponsored Day Takeover’ ad unit which sat at the top of the site.
Toyota worked on the activation with creative agency Saatchi & Saatchi and the initiative is part of its demographic targeting stretch – while many of the festival’s 75,000 live attendees were in their 40s, 50s and 60s, 75% of the traffic on Yahoo’s social site is mobile and millennial so the digital stream aims to being the music experience to a wider audience.
This famous country music carnival, which features stars like Chris Young, Eric Church, Joe Nichols, Lee Ann Womack and The Doobie Brothers, is held
The Stagecoach stream is part of Toyota’s wider campaign to promote its recently launched music content site ‘Music Moves You’ (see https://musicmovesyou.tumblr.com/)
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These two brands have allied together before to sponsor live events and music festivals and have even streamed some of them in the past.
For example, the duo joined up to offer a live stream of the Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) in Las Vegas last year (along with fellow sponsor 7UP).
But this is the first live stream on Tumblr.
Indeed, the summer of 2016 already looks like it’s going to be the summer of the livestreamed concert.
After all, Toyota Stagecoach activation followed just one week after T-Mobile sponsored YouTube’s 360 livestream of Coachella.
This is just one small part of a much bigger live streaming trend – as Yahoo and YouTube match Facebook’s move in this space (not to mention Twitter’s deal to livestream the NFL next season).
And it isn’t just music and entertainment either.
For instance, that same Saturday Yahoo Finance also hosted a live stream of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting.
It also sold partnerships for this initiative too with brands such as TD Ameritrade and Scottrade sponsoring the pre-show and halftime report on Yahoo Finance – connecting with viewers through video and display ads.
Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, who choose to webcast the event to ‘to enter the 21st Century’ and wrote in the previous shareholder letter that there was no need to come to ‘all the way to Omaha to see how we look and sound’, used the livestream to offer their opinions on the business, the general marketplace and economy, as well as fielding questions.
Livestreaming is exploding across all digital channels and is thus creating new partnership opportunities for all sorts of brands and recent Brandlive research shows that 44% of US companies created live video content in 2015.
Clearly brands of all shapes and sizes are exploring sponsorships with live-streaming platforms for events that may appeal to their target audiences.
Links
Stagecoach Festival Tumblr:
http://stagecoachlive.tumblr.com/
Stagecoach Festival:
http://www.stagecoachfestival.com/
Toyota Music Moves You:
https://musicmovesyou.tumblr.com/
Saatchi & Saatchi:
