Song on air = clip online
Absynthe Minded - Website, social media, mobile
Issue 24 | September 2012
Agency
Mortierbrigade
Creative Team
Creative Directors: Jens Mortier, Joost Berends, Philippe De Ceuster Creative Team: Tim Arts and Stefan Van Den Boogaard
Production Team
Agency Producer: Emilie Kino Webdesign: Mathieu Michaux Interactive Producer: Jonathan Wieme Editing: Louk Voncken & Godefroi Gilbert Web development: Wijs Sound Recognition: intrasonics & Momads
Other Credits
Client: Tom De Clerq
Date
March 2012
Background
Absynthe Minded is an alternative rock band. They are pretty big in Belgium, yet small in Europe.
They wanted to engage with fans across the whole continent. The question was, how?
Idea
Mortierbrigade’s solution was to make a video that could only be seen if and when the song got played on the radio.
An audio watermark was added to Absynthe Minded's new single Space.
Special software constantly screened the selected radio stations that specialised in alternative rock and when one of them played the song, a signal was sent to the server to play the video.
If people wanted to see the video, they had to ask their radio station to play the song.
Results
On the very first day of the launch, people started spamming DJ's on Twitter and Facebook to play the song.
DJs picked up the campaign and began talking about it on Twitter and on air.
But, more importantly, they played the song.
Within two weeks, the song was played every hour somewhere in Europe.
212,000 people from abroad visited the band’s website to see the video.
And that's how a small Belgian band got on radio and blogs all over Europe and reached out both to their existing fans and a bunch of new ones.
Our Thoughts
That’s the wonderful thing about human nature. When you tell someone not to do something, they instantly want to do it. So, when you tell people they can’t see a video, it is all they want to do.
This must have been quite labour intensive. I can only presume that someone at the agency likes Absynthe Minded’s music a lot.