EXTRA® Support Acts
EXTRA® Gum
Issue 49 | December 2018
Agency
Clemenger BBDO Sydney
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Ben Coulson and Paul Nagy Creative Director Brendan Willenberg Creative team Willy Maitland and Zander Williment Head of Craft Daniel Mortensen Head of Creative Technology Bob Forster
Production Team
Lead Digital Producer Claire Bisset Production company Milkmoney Director Ethan Mclean Producer Emma Whitehouse DOP Don Buppapirak Gaffer Justin Plummer Music production Gareth Plummer
Other Credits
Talent, music strategy and content Universal Music Australia and BRING Platform partner YouTube Media agency Mediacom Planning Director Kit Landsdell Head of Account Management Madeleine Marsh Senior Account Director Hanne Haugen Senior Account Director Emily Taylor-Delplanque Senior Account Manager Katie Scrutton Client EXTRA® Gum Senior Brand Manager EXTRA® Gum Virginia Marsh Wrigley Marketing Director Alison Levins Freshening Marketing Manager Alexandra Hume
Date
August – November 2018
Background
Extra wanted to introduce their new brand platform ‘Time to Shine’ to the music space.
The challenge was to create positive associations with the Extra brand, but with millennials in the crosshairs the task was to ensure they were enhancing their world not intruding it.
So, the idea was to do-away with something they hated -ads- and replace them with something they loved – music.
Idea
More people listen to and discover music on YouTube than anywhere else, and knowing that their target audience spent huge amounts of time on the platform, the idea was to partner with YouTube and create EXTRA® Support Acts.
In partnership with YouTube and Universal Music Australia, the Support Acts platform created a new stage for unsigned artists, by transforming pre-roll ads on YouTube in to a digital support stage.
Working with Australian music royalty 5 Seconds of Summer, Alison Wonderland, The Rubens and 360, 16 emerging artists were given the chance to perform – through pre-roll ads – to audiences in the millions, and they were brought to the forefront of Australian pop-culture.
If you searched for any track by one of the headline artists, instead of seeing an annoying ad, you’d instead see a performance by Support Acts, and at the end of the campaign, Australia’s next big acts were found across the genres of pop, rock, urban and electronic.
Results
• 17.2M views of the pre-roll ads
• 30.7M of the Support Acts performances viewed
• 15M views on the EXTRA® Support Acts YouTube channel
• 18m+ earned media reach
• 100% positive sentiment
All in all, not a bad way to bring gum back in to the consciousness of young people across Australia.
Our Thoughts
This is a rather wonderful story of collaboration, of the agency working with a media owner and a music publisher to get a number of successful music acts to give encouragement to musicians struggling for air. And all in the name of a chewing gum.
But they’ve pulled it off. In this campaign everyone gets to win out. The stars feel good about supporting the lesser-knowns, who feel good about the exposure they get, which pleases the record company, who sell more music, and Extra get to mean something positive and significant to an audience that has discovered how to shut advertisers out of their world.
This is what creativity does. It finds a way to pause that finger from clicking on the Skip button. It gets people to keep watching and to think, however grudgingly, ‘that’s cool’.