O2 Academy VenuesO2 Academy Venues

Objective / brief from client:

The aim of this campaign was to create awareness around O2’s sponsorship of the Academy music venues (previously the Carling Academy Venues) as well as raise brand consideration amongst the gig loving audience.

Strategy:

The challenge was to create awareness of the sponsorship whilst not being seen as simply another corporate sponsor. We knew that consumers would have reservations about O2’s sponsorship of the Academy venues - thinking they could be simply branded and turned into sterile music environments. In this cluttered market of music sponsorship, we needed to do more than just badge the O2 Academy venues; we had to prove ourselves worthy to create brand affinity. Our key insight was that gigging experiences are shared experiences; whether you are singing with your friends or moshing with strangers to the band, shared moments are always at the heart of any amazing gigging experience. We wanted to enhance the existing Academy venue experience and specifically those ‘shared’ moments. So we developed the strategic positioning ‘O2 connects you to better shared music experiences’. This allowed us to bring it back to the consumer and avoid the murky waters of music content.

Method deployed:

We created Facebook pages for each of the Academy venues where fans could find out about upcoming gigs, review past gigs and connect with the wider gigging audience. We then installed photo booths in each of the Academy venues to snap pictures of you and your friends enjoying shared experiences. Photos are then uploaded to the appropriate Facebook pages where we encourage fans to tag themselves to help relive their experiences. Plus we reward loyal fans with free gig tickets for their active involvement. We also created an advertising app that sat on NME.com that allowed users to easily search for gigs relevant to them and then allowing them to invite their mates to the gig via Facebook.

Creativity / innovation

The groundbreaking suite of applications for the O2 Academy Facebook pages pull information from numerous external feeds and intelligently combine the data into a format familiar to users of Facebook. Each O2 Academy gig is recreated as a Facebook event and listed on the Upcoming Gigs tab and are updated whenever a gig altered. Photographs from SnapBooths at the venues are transferred onto Facebook and intelligently assigned to gigs, so that fans can quickly find and tag themselves and their friends.

Outcome, including formal evaluation of results

  • Over 100k fans across our 12 pages all organically grown (no media spend)
  • Engagement – 1800 likes and 2400 comments per week (across all 12 pages)
  • Awareness of O2’s sponsorship of the Academy venues (from 0%) – awareness at 13%
  • Increasing O2 brand consideration (from 32%) – consideration at 36%