Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation ?

As TV music channels, we found our audience firing up apps for their music needs, in order to remain relevant we knew we had to create equity on digital as well. With World Music Day fast approaching we decided to use one of the most pervasive digital platforms - Facebook to reach our audience and help them experience high quality, diverse genres of music that each channel specializes in through the live on the Facebook and Instagram.

Background

Situation: Most of our audience are firing up apps for their music needs, as TV channels for music we needed to create relevance in this space, and reach out to them on digital. Brief: How do we create relevance on digital as Music TV channels? Objectives: 1. To reach our audience and build brand relevance on digital. 2. Ensure more than 10 million reach for the Live and 200k+ engagements (since this was a first-of-its-kind initiative we could benchmark only basis previous, short format Facebook Lives and extrapolating from there).

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

The idea was a first ever 24 hour music festival on Facebook Live. Getting more than 40 artists from different genres to perform Live on our Facebook pages for the entire country to tune into at any given time during the World Music Day.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

Audience is Gen Z primarily and young millenials, for Vh1 and MTV Beats. People who love to listen to music - Bollywood lovers as well as consumers of English music. People who are digital natives and fast switching to apps for music and travel and everything else. We know our audience is super active on Facebook and Instagram so we had to reach them through those platforms, in order to do that we also needed to get their favorite artists on board. Which is why we had top artists in the music scene in India as a part of this mammoth 24 hour music festival. We positioned it as the first music festival in the country without queues, heat or porta-potties! Just pure music and pure enjoyment from wherever one was in the country at the time.

Describe the execution (30% of vote)

We wanted to create a unique announcement for the Live, so we got our artists to tweet about World Music Day and wonder about what they should do for it, while tagging the next artist on the same tweet. Thus starting a tag chain on Twitter, which got all their fans asking what was in the works. This ended with both brands stepping in and announcing the initiative of 'Long LIVE Music' on Facebook Live. We also took the promos on-air and put the word out through trade mailers. The actual event took place from 12 am of 21st June to 12 am of 22nd June 2019, lasting the full 24 hours on Vh1 and MTV Beats' Facebook pages. Logistically, the challenge lay in the switch from one artist to the next during the Live. The Live reached Vh1 and MTV Beats' audience on Facebook and Instagram.

List the results (30% of vote)

Since this was a first-of-its-kind initiative, we had a benchmark of a 10 million reach overall and 200k+ engagements, basis extrapolation from a few Facebook Lives done earlier and as per the audience response to those lives. The numbers were 6 times more than what we'd expected: 60 MN+ Reach 25 MN+ Impressions 10 MN+ Views 5 MN+ Engagements But more than anything else, 10 million people tuned into the Live itself, which is far more than 5 lakh music festival goers in India during the entire year combined.