The Guardian has gathered 25,000 registrations since launching its Six songs of Me campaign, showing how innovative creative can deliver long-term opportunities.
Spotify announced that it was launching a player that meant publishers could embed songs into their websites earlier this year and The Guardian has been one of many publishers to embrace using it to add multimedia content into articles. It’s one of the features that Spotify VP of Europe Chris Maples told new media age is helping the company change from a clever little app to a big, scaled digital business.
The Six Songs of Me campaign, by creative agency glue Isobar, has taken this to the next level, by making a platform that allows people to select and listen to songs from Spotify that represent who they are within six categories. The categories include ‘first song you ever bought’ and ‘song you want played at your funeral’.
The idea is inherently social and sharable and after answering it shows how many people also selected the songs, including demographic stats and information, which is a natural fit for the Guardian’s open journalism brand. In addition to the clever creative idea the campaign has already generated 25,000 sign ups and is seeing dwell time average at over 4 mins.
What’s key about this campaign and sets it out above other nifty digital music campaigns is the long-term strategy that underpins the sexy creative side of things. As The Guardian’s director of brand engagement Richard Furness explained, “They could be very light users, or this might be the first time they have interacted with The Guardian so trying to sell those people a subscription straight away would be pretty futile. It will be quite a complex piece of CRM looking at who they are and how to communicate with them.”
It’s been a week of positive news for newspaper publishers as rival broadsheet The Times has announced figures for its subscriptions, stating that the paid iPad edition is read by 60,000 people every morning.
The common theme from both publishers is that they’ve taken risks. It could be argued that there are many fails that both The Guardian and The Times wouldn’t bring out in public but these are still two very strong examples of where a gamble has been taken because the publisher has had confidence in their digital products.
