The vice president of new media explains how the record company must partner with unexpected sites to reach a core audience.
Virgin Records has a unique online marketing challenge: how to use the Internet to generate sales on a product that gets downloaded for free and easily copied via CD burners. It’s having a severe effect on the company’s business model. “Our goal on every online campaign is to find the core 10% of music fans who bought the last record,” says Ty Braswell, the company’s vice president of new media. “Our hope is the loyal 10% will tell the other 90% to go BUY the record. It becomes our compass in how we evaluate a media buy, our investments in online promotions, and everything else.”
Braswell oversees new media strategies for a variety of Virgin artists, including Lenny Kravitz, Janet Jackson, and Ben Harper. Braswell spoke recently to iMedia Connection about his company’s unique challenges in the online space.
Meet Ty at the iMedia Brand Summit next week in Utah.
iMedia Connection: What has your company done recently that’s different and unique in the interactive space? And can the data be tracked and supported with credible research?
Braswell: Our current focus is to reach music fans on Websites that have never produced music promotions. This month we launched an inaugural campaign with Delta.com for Lenny Kravitz. The first 10,000 new e-mail customers who registered online for the Delta Skymiles program received the new Lenny CD and were entered to win a chance to “Fly Away” with three friends to see Lenny’s concert in Los Angeles, meet Lenny and get an autographed guitar.
The cool spin on this promotion is the in-flight cross-promotion. Over the three weeks of the campaign, we recruited flight attendants on select Delta flights to promote the Lenny online contest after making their regular announcements over the intercom. To make it more fun, flight attendants also asked trivia questions about Lenny during the flight for an instant prize. The in-flight winners got a Lenny CD and a free ticket to see Lenny the next day in their destination city.
We also launched our first online sports-related promotion with CBS Sportsline.com. This was a tie-in with the girl surfer flick Blue Crush. Lenny’s track “If I Could Fall In Love” is the lead single from the soundtrack. For this promotion, a winner got flown to San Diego for a perfect Labor Day vacation. On Saturday, they got a Blue Crush surfboard with a personalized surfing lesson and then the next day VIP seats to see Lenny. CBS Sportsline.com hit its 3-million+ e-mail database with messaging about Lenny and we did the same with Lenny’s database plus the Virgin Records list to drive traffic to CBS Sportsline.com. For both of us, the campaign was a winner.
We also cover all the music and entertainment sites with promotions, but there’s so much clutter on music sites, it’s getting harder to get placement. So we try to branch out to places that have never done any music programming, because we think this strategy will yield a greater result. We hope these sites are where we might find more music fans that buy CDs versus the music fan that is looking to ‘digitally shoplift’ music.
iMedia Connection: What sort of cross-media campaigns have your run?
Braswell: Last October, if you bought Lenny Kravitz’ record at VH1.com or MTV.com before it was in the stores, you would get a secure stream of the entire album while you’re waiting for your CD to be shipped. These were the only Websites worldwide where you could listen to the record in advance of being in record stores.
MTV & VH1 produced a 30-sec TV spot that cross-marketed with our online campaign on VH1.com and MTV.com. The result was an integrated campaign that generated the buzz we needed two weeks before the release of Lenny’s CD.
iMedia Connection: Can your company point to evidence that suggests online advertising and marketing are contributing positively to branding metrics (purchase intent, brand awareness, etc.)?
Braswell: For the Delta campaign with Lenny Kravitz, we registered just under 50,000 folks in the online contest, which is the biggest online contest to date for Virgin Records. Over 35% of the entrants were new e-mail enrollments for Delta.com. The campaign generated a 30%+ increase in incremental daily enrollments. Twenty-six percent of the entrants forwarded messaging to friends and just under 10% of those friends entered the contest. A strong open rate of 62% of the entrants to the contest opened their confirmation e-mails, which gave info on how to buy Lenny’s current CD, and to stream his new single “If I Could Fall In Love.” This was the first time Delta.com put a promotion with a record label on its home page, and in our mind it was a huge success.
Both the Delta and CBS Sportsline promotion were generated from my trip in the spring to the last iMedia Brand Summit.
iMedia Connection: Since interactive is the most accountable advertising and marketing medium, what are you doing to effectively measure the overall effects of various initiatives online, such as advertising, promotions, CRM, etc.?
Braswell: We did an e-mail campaign with MP3.com for N.E.R.D., a new group that had never really done a proper tour before. We looked at the early ticket sales and could not determine if the N.E.R.D. fan would buy tickets at the last minute as with some concerts or if our advance ticket counts were going to be our final numbers. So we went to MP3.com, rented its music fan list, and blasted the tour markets 48 hours before each concert date. In Detroit, 53% of the tickets were bought at the door. We went back and did a follow-up survey to the same e-mail list and estimated that 27% of the tickets sold at the door were generated by the e-mail blast 48 hours before the show.
iMedia Connection: How essential is it for the industry to measure apples-to-apples by using comprehensive online reach and frequency metrics, such as online GRPs?
Braswell: For the music industry, the Internet is both friend and foe. It is a friend for global exposure but the enemy that makes it too easy to ‘digitally shoplift’ music. Our challenge only increases without a good yardstick to measure the effect of our promotional efforts.
iMedia Connection: What are the obstacles preventing your company from allocating less than 1% of its marketing/advertising budget online?
Braswell: Dependable, credible measurement tools. I need a tool that will prove to people that if I spend a buck, it will sell a CD. And I haven’t found anybody who can do that yet. If you can give me an online tool that could prove that, we’d allocate a million bucks tomorrow -- wouldn’t even think twice.
Ty Braswell is bringing to the iMedia Brand Summit the next great rock band to explode in the United States -- The Exies. They will perform at Monday’s cocktail party. Preview their music at www.the-exies.com