From Lag to Launch: Playground Sessions
The promise that a group like ZAG offers an ad agency is when the agency owns the brand they have the potential and the responsibility to do great work. They can only blame themselves if this doesn’t happen. Even when the stars are aligned, launching a start up is never easy. The BBH and ZAG team seized this opportunity for Playground Sessions.
The Background:
Playground Sessions is an invention that came through the Brand Lag process that ZAG developed. The lag was discovered over two years ago by a team that included Terris Poole, Greg Andersen, Ben Jenkins, Theodora Stites and Chris Vance. To make the lag a reality the team worked with a software developer out of Salt Lake City called Media Rain and the YouTube piano sensation David Sides. The past two years were spent securing music rights, developing lessons, coding software, designing websites, applying visual identity, growing social communities, wooing investors, drafting legal documents, entertaining partnerships and more.
The Creative:
The concept of Playground Sessions is to reinvent the way people learn music. The creative team used BackStage.com to find somebody in New York who wanted to learn how to play piano but has never tried before. We found an amazing guy named Will White. We asked him to learn a song using Playground Sessions and perform a concert featuring that song in 30 days. With the production expertise of B-Reel we created a documentary-style cinematic journey that follows the 30 days that Will took to learn the song. You can see here:
The Propagation Plan:
Prior to Launch Comms Task: Be Social We first set up a “Coming Soon” website using Weebly and MailChimp to capture emails. We then established a User Voice account to help determine the types of songs that we secured. We started our social presence and grew these communities organically over the first 10 months with Facebook (3000 Likes) and Twitter (700 Followers). It was a good start with our initial Beta testers. Our Social Media team used Sysomos and Shoutlet for monitoring, engagement and tracking.
Launch Comms Task: Be Fascinating The week before launch we started advertising on Google with Ad Words and Twitter with Promoted Accounts. We grew our Twitter following to over 6000 leading up to the launch date. On November 3rd, 2011 we worked with YouTube to seed a special announcement video for David Sides fans using annotations. You can see that here:
Post Launch Comms Task: Be Famous On November 7th our Clear Channel national radio campaign started which we loved from a context standpoint running on many Top 40 music formats. We kicked off our Facebook video campaign with the help of Social Envy that earned over 125,000 views. Finally our friends at Ad.ly got Playground Sessions into the hands of celebrities and here are some of those Tweets:
Today we have over 13,000 Twitter Followers, over 9,000 Facebook Followers. We have had hundreds of people install the software on their computers and are excited about the future press and partnership deals that we are working on.
Credit and Special Mention:
- David Sides: YouTube Sensation
- Andrew Howlett: Media Rain CEO
- Amy Hatch: Media Rain Digital Producer
- Nate Ross: Media Rain Developer
- Ryan Nelson: Media Rain Developer
- Nigel Bogle: ZAG Board Chairman
- Neil Munn: ZAG CEO
- Chris Vance: Playground Sessions CEO
- Terris Poole: Playground Sessions Lead Designer
- Amanda Spivak: Playground Sessions Assistant Brand Manager
- Colin Gorman: Playground Sessions Partnership Manager
- Darren Majewski: Playground Sessions Royalty Rights Manager
- Jim Altieri: Playground Sessions Music Technologist
- Erin Riley: Playground Sessions Marketing Director
- Griffin Farley: Playground Sessions Marketing Director
- Greg Andersen: BBH New York CEO
- Suzanne Kucera: BBH New York CFO
- Colleen Leddy: BBH Engagement Planning Director
- Susan Corbo: BBH Creative Director
- Maja Folgero: BBH Jr. Copy Writer
- Felipe Montt: BBH Jr. Art Director
- Ian Hart: BBH Senior Copy Writer
- Dave Brown: BBH Senior Art Director
- Andrea Rodriguez: BBH Broadcast Producer
