THE PROBLEM

How do you engage hard to reach audiences?

© Photography by Rob Jones (www.instagram.com/hirobjones)

Client

SONY MUSIC

Project Type

AUDIENCE CLOSENESS,
EVENTS, YOUTH CULTURE

Location

UK

References

THE BRIEF

We were approached by the Sony Music insight team who wanted to speak to Gen. Z UK Rap fanatics - a group of fans that are typically difficult to engage with.

So how do you do best-in-class market research with an audience that are hard to reach, and would be unresponsive to anything deemed remotely uncool?

What followed required a return to the drawing board, and an innovative and highly creative research project that was conducted in a completely new way.

IMMERSIVE AUDIENCE CLOSENESS •IMMERSIVE AUDIENCE CLOSENESS •IMMERSIVE AUDIENCE CLOSENESS •IMMERSIVE AUDIENCE CLOSENESS •IMMERSIVE AUDIENCE CLOSENESS •
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OUR SOLUTION

We knew that a traditional approach wouldn’t engage this audience, so we made a collaborative fanzine instead.

Regardless of how you pitch it to them, if you try to recruit this type of audience via traditional means, using recruiter networks armed with rec. spec questionnaires, you will hit a wall very quickly.

Enter PAVE zine. A magazine for passionate young music lovers to be heard, share their views on the genre’s that matter most to them, collaborate with like-minded fans from all over the country, and bring it all together with a team of designers and artists.

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OUR SOLUTION

We positioned our respondents as contributors - putting them in the driving seat.

Every zine needs a story, so get really immersed in their lives.

How We Did It

Plenty of desk research meant we knew where we needed to be seen, and we kicked off a social media recruitment campaign with highly targeted adverts, along with a spate of flyer drops and poster pin ups at gigs, as well as colleges and university campuses.

We had an overwhelming amount of applicants from all over the UK, with Grime fans from Glasgow and Drill fans from inner-city London all keen to get involved. All excited about the prospect of participating in a creative project with a clear output shaped by their opinions and expertise.

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Content Creation

Using our online research platform Cumulus, we gathered self-recorded snapshots of contributors lives, recorded across a three week period.

Touching on topics such as fashion, politics, region, representation, and their general day-to-day life.

Contributor's Meeting

We then invited the contributors to join us and the Sony Music team for a zine making workshop.

Lots of collaging, scanning, discussion, reviewing and debate, which provided us with a wealth of awesome visuals and some deeper insight into how the genre is seen from their perspective.

THE RESULTS

Immersive Closeness

Beyond the trove of content and insight we had uncovered for the Sony Music insight team, the process had resulted in the production of a truly collaborative fanzine, something that our contributors were proud to have been involved in.

To celebrate the zine we’d produced together we hosted. a launch event, full of immersive and creative experiences, in a railway arch space in Bethnal Green. Zine contributors and their friends from across the UK attended, providing a space and an opportunity for the wider Sony Music marketing team to really engage with their young audience.

© Photography by Rob Jones (www.instagram.com/hirobjones)
© Photography by Rob Jones (www.instagram.com/hirobjones)
© Photography by Rob Jones (www.instagram.com/hirobjones)
© Photography by Rob Jones (www.instagram.com/hirobjones)
© Photography by Rob Jones (www.instagram.com/hirobjones)

THE RESULTS

The best ever
engagement scores
for a consumer closeness programme at Sony Music

A hyped audience closeness event attended by over 20 senior executives and marketers, and the wealth of content and insights the project generated were distilled into a branded internal engagement programme - delivered to the insight team to allow further provocation within the wider business over the subsequent weeks and months.

“Loved it. We worked very closely with The Mix to design the work to really speak to our internal audiences and it did just that”

Martin Vovk
Consumer intelligence, Sony Music

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