2014 Bronze Best Use of Mobile

Client Universal Music Group

Team Andy Flight - Account Director, Chris Minas - Managing Director, Yaw Dako - Technical Lead, Deborah Hyacinth - Vice President- International Digital Marketing, George Harbb - Global Digital Marketing

How did the campaign make a difference? Universal Music is constantly looking for new ways to engage with artists’ fans.

To coincide with the launch of The Rolling Stones’ Greatest Hits album, ‘Grrr’, Universal wanted to build anticipation and excitement to reach fans pre-launch – whilst celebrating the incredible career of one of the world’s most iconic bands.

The uView Augmented Reality (AR) app brought the real world and the virtual world together to deliver a truly immersive experience that allowed the Stones to acquire, engage and increase a new generation of fans through mobile technology.

Strategy To win over a new generation of fans, mobile and social activity was used to drive an experience that would feel more personal, engaging and localised.

Using 3D animations of the gorilla from the album sleeve, over 3000 iconic locations around the world were tagged to trigger different animations for app users to interact with. Clues were left across the band’s social network – building anticipation, encouraging fans to visit the tagged locations and driving competition entries.

Once the album was officially released, fans were able to buy it straight from the app.

Creativity The strategy was literally brought to life using new AR 3D technology. Across 50 global locations – from the Eiffel Tower to Big Ben, the Statue of Liberty to the Sydney Opera House – a 3D Gregory the Gorilla interacted with his surrounding landscape, powered by sophisticated image detection and augmented reality.

The campaign was extended into 3D animations, stickies, artistrelated content and animations within the app to make sure it became a much talked about, re-usable and fun way for fans to interact with friends and their favourite bands globally.

The app is constantly updated with new artists and new material to keep it fresh and fun to use – with audio recognition next to be added to further increase engagement.

Results Gregory the gorilla was seen over 250,000 times on buildings across the world and over 32,000 competitions entries were received. The app now features many more Universal artists such as Black Sabbath, Robbie Williams and Paul McCartney.

The campaign paid off – generating huge earned media coverage and over 250,000 new fans in the first three months.

The app achieved high levels of engagement along with a global reach and uplift in sales.