Who Put The Mashup In This Year’s Mashup?
Posted by meredith on 06-08-2009
While my memory of the Ypulse Mashup is still sharp, I figured I’d tack on one final theme to Anastasia’s six: the mashup impulse (appropriate, no?). In his morning keynote Josh Shipp challenged marketers to support young people’s irreverent creative tendencies by prompting brands to ask themselves, “Can teens have access to your ammo? Can they mess up your logo? Make YouTube videos?” The implication being if the answer is “yes” and teens are taking you up on your offer then chances are you’re on the right path.
This case in point was illustrated and discussed throughout the two days of Mashup (including over lunch at the”Future of Fan Fiction” discussion I held), but most clearly by two sessions from brands who have already seen the payoff in dividends. The first was Doug Sweeny from Levi’s who demonstrated how their 501 jeans campaign fostered brand love through a series of unbranded viral videos released on YouTube. After putting them out Levi’s stepped back and allowed buzz to build and response videos to accumulate– the one linked to here, featuring guys backflipping into jeans, racked up 50m hits and 200 response videos– only later re-joining the conversation to step up as creator and eventually reformat the videos as TV ads. It was a risky move (both safety and publicity-wise), but one that clearly proved their understanding and respect for youth culture and a willingness to put the brand’s so-called ammo in their hands.
Our lunch sponsor Disney took this dynamic to the next level, not only encouraging, but requesting this type of engagement from their younger audience with Disney’s “U Rock The Summer” campaign (now being followed by U Rock 2) where fans could download content from Disney Records and create their own music videos. Making sure to emphasize safety and inclusiveness (the site included an instructional How-to video for the less tech-inclined), Disney created a user-generated space where fans could engage and “play with” their favorite artists. The response was thousands of videos submitted in a matter weeks, and over 3M videos viewed. And the metric that I found most telling: the ugc videos of Jonas Brothers actually performed two times as well as official Jonas Brothers music video.
P.S. The first batch of speaker presentations are up now on the Mashup site!
Categorized under: 2009 Mashup
June 8th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
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