Advertisers have long used popular music to marry brands to the emotional response that
music can provide.
An increasing number of brands are now looking to woo the youth market using dance music and hip hop in the hope of making that lucrative connection.<[etk]>
“Dance and hip hop now have a pretty broad appeal within the youth market,” managing partner of Naked Communications, Mat Baxter, says.
“The language of youth is music, and while brands recognise that they can create relevance by using music, some brands do it better than others.”
One of the best examples at the moment is the Apple iPod campaign, according to Baxter, but brands that align with music in an unsuccessful way can have an adverse effect on the way people experience music.
“[iPod] is not necessarily jumping on a bandwagon, but aligning with the way people use and enjoy music,” he says.
“People listen to music as a one-to-one experience and the last thing they want is for a brand to step in the way of that relationship. Sport and music are two things in Australian culture where it can be very detrimental to approach the wrong way as a brand.”
While Baxter acknowledges that different types of dance music can appeal to different sectors of the youth market, he doesn’t believe it is being that narrowly focused.
“Dance and hip hop have a currency and are a meaningful outlet for young people—it’s tribal to some extent, but genres haven’t split enough, it’s still fairly broad.”
In fact, the appeal of dance and hip hop is actually broadening, according to Lion Nathan marketing director, Paul Foster.
“With young adulthood extending to include people in their 30s, these music types are appealing to a greater number of people than they used to and therefore may be used more widely across a number of product categories and for a variety of individual brands,”he says.
And it’s particularly true for products that attempt to be positioned as a little bit different, energetic and exciting, such as the Tooheys Extra Dry ‘Quest’ TVC which featured the exploits of a roving tongue set to a pulsing dance beat. The track in question, ‘Satisfaction’ by Benny Benassi, was chosen for its relative anonymity prior to the spot going to air and its catchy base line.
“These factors enabled ‘Satisfaction’to become instantly recognisable and synonymous with Tooheys Extra Dry, meaning an increase in talkability within the target audience,” Foster says.
The campaign was further helped along when the track was picked up by radio stations Nova and Triple J, effectively extending the TVC into a radio campaign, helping the single reach gold medal status and boosting Tooheys Extra Dry sales by 34%.
“Like all great movies these days, creating an advertisement that will capture the imaginations of the target audience to entertain time and time again, means including a ‘soundtrack’ that resonates. To an extent, ‘Satisfaction’ came to be known as ‘the song from that tongue ad’,” Foster says.
Brand and marketing manager for Virgin Mobile, Andy Mallinson, also had the potential of music for creating emotional attachment at top of mind when planning the 5 Cent campaign. The comedic campaign—a collaboration between Virgin Mobile’s agency Host and creative house The Glue Society—featured a pint-sized rapper performing a specially-written hip hop track.
“Using a type of music like hip hop can be very targeted, but if we had used a 50 Cent track we would have had only hip hop lovers,” Mallinson says.
Having a limited budget and a need to get a lot of bang for buck was another reason the comedy pastiche angle was chosen.
“Unlike a brand like iPod, we had no clear reason to be doing a heavily music-based ad so we went for the music comedy angle rather than straight music.”
The music also tied a lot of elements of the campaign together. The proposition ‘Get tighter with your posse’ was a perfect fit for the hip hop genre. The chart success of Eminem and 50 Cent at the time of release was also good.
Mallinson says subsequent research showed a massive jump in awareness and in engagement with the product.
“We took the 5 Cent character on a tour of the Big Day Out east coast dates,” he says.
“I was amazed at the number of people who not only recognised him as 5 Cent, but who kept coming out with the Virgin to Virgin tagline.”
While both ‘Quest’ and ‘5 Cent’are examples of the successful use of a specific music genre as part of a campaign, any use of music can be a very fine line between connecting the track or genre to the brand and failing spectacularly, according to Baxter.
“It all comes down to engagement—there are brands that get it right and others where it is clearly a forced relationship. If you can’t demonstrate the benefit of your involvement to the consumer, then you shouldn’t be there.”
