Obsessed with Sound
Philips Lifestyle Entertainment
Issue 23 | May 2012
Agency
Tribal DDB Amsterdam
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director: Chris Baylis; Art Director/Concept: Bart Mol; Copywriter/Concept: Pol Hoenderboom; Designer: Robbin Cenjin; Creative Technologist: Ian Bauer
Other Credits
Global Business Director: Sandra Krstic; Technical Lead: Jan Willem Penterman; Strategy Director: Henk Rijks; Producer: Jeroen Jedeloo; Project Manager: Richard Land, Christy Wassenaar; Editor, Metropole Orchestra: Nikaj Gouwerok; Planner, Social Media: Niels Bellar
Date
September 2011
Background
Philips wanted to take their 2010 “Obsessed with Sound” online presence to a higher level and create an engaging platform that would help increase consideration of Philips as an audio brand by 15% by 2015.
The target audience was sound purists, mostly male and regular readers of specialised audio press and test reviews. They did not mind paying for quality and regarded superior sound to be true to the original: real, pure, natural and clear.
The insight was that for these purists, every tiny detail mattered. The warmth and depth of the music came from the 2nd violinist, the triangle player and the producer.
Idea
A unique interactive video was created, which would demonstrate Philips’s obsession with sound and show that listeners could hear every tiny detail of a recording with Philips audio products.
The Grammy Award-winning Metropole Orchestra recorded a music piece, “I’m No Prototype”, in 55 separate music tracks.
At http://ows.clients.vellance.net/ows/ viewers could experience the music video as a whole, played by the entire orchestra. At the bottom of the screen were 55 dots, each representing one of the musicians. Click on a dot and the viewer now heard just what that musician was playing in every detail.
The experience started through Facebook with trailers, behind the scenes footage and product information.
There was also a special ‘Obsessed with Sound’ music competition promoted by U2 producer Steve Lillywhite, which led to over 1400 submissions.
Inky, the winning band, were flown in to Amsterdam, had their track specially rewritten for the whole orchestra to play and was recorded by Steve Lillywhite himself.
Results
Over 600.000 people watched the interactive video. While the piece only lasted 3 minutes, people spent around 4.5 minutes on the site. An amazing 12% of visitors wanted to know more about Philips’ sound products on Philips.com
The campaign was a big PR success with hundreds of blog posts, Twitter- and Facebook shares, generating publicity among an additional audience of thousands.
The fan base of the Philips Sound Facebook page increased by 2,100%, From 10,000 to 210,000 fans.
Our Thoughts
Companies that make so many different lines of products, like Philips, have a hard time appearing obsessed about any single one of them. But this approach is an absolutely convincing way to flaunt audio passion, complete with nice data viz, and wonderfully deep and relevant user engagement.