Juanes UGC video contest gets mobile boost
A recent contest inviting fans of Colombian artist Juanes to send in video cover versions was a big hit with mobile users, according to advertising agency Vidal Partnership.
30% of entries were filmed and submitted using mobile phones, rather than webcams or camcorders and computers. “Hispanics are more prone to use their phones for these things,” says Vidal boss Alberto Ferrer.
The contest was apparently a success for Sprint, which commissioned it, with monthly downloads increasing 63% during the competition, including a rise of 93% for Juanes ringback tones.
March 26th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
[...] recently, while Colombian superstar Juanes asked fans to send in video covers, and found 30% doing it via their mobile phones. Of course, there’s also the option of miming: the new series of Flight of the Conchords was [...]
March 27th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Really interesting post, I think UGC is a great way to build engagement, especially for bigger profile artists where the size of the fan base guarantees a certain volume and quality of entries.
I think it’s a less useful tool in general for smaller or breaking artists – though Thunderheist and Broadcast 2000 are two artists I can think of who ran music video UGC competitions and got some truly stunning entries – they were both really great tracks and that’s what made the difference. There are also very many UGC music video competitions/invitations which are lacklustre to say the least. They have ever-extending deadlines “we’ve been so overwhelmed with entries we’re giving you even more time to submit” – yeah yeah – and little inducement for directors to make the effort. It’s easy to do UGC poorly and end up with not much material, which no-one apart from immediate friends and family of the creator want to watch.
We occupy another space which is slowly beginning to get occupied. Loosely, it’s crowdsourcing with a professional twist. Radar’s model invites music video directors to submit treaments, from which clients commission – we then help promote the finished video. 99$ music videos launched recently with a similar-ish model. What we and some others share is we aim at professional or semi pro directors. We for instance headhunt directors who stand out on YouTube or Vimeo or are award winners.
The result is a single piece of content, but it’s filtered according to expertise; so what clients may lose from generating multiple pieces of content (assuming they attract a lot of creators), they gain from getting good quality, close to the ground content – which is arguably easier to promote for smaller clients in a crowded marketplace. Some of our videos have well over 500,000 youtube views.
thanks for the post, good stuff
Caroline
http://www.twitter.com/radarmusicvideo