Joss Davidge, Business Director of brand experience agency BEcause, continues his weekly quest for innovative marketing ideas. This week he looks at how V energy drink turned a live experience into a journey that has got everyone talking.
With Red Bull plastered over almost every adventure sport and high-adrenaline experience it must be difficult for similar energy drink brands, which thrive off the same energetic key messages, to get a look in. This week I came across a brilliant campaign from New Zealand by Frucor, the Australasian beverage company that produces V energy drink. The campaign has resulted in an explosion of online and offline conversations, national radio airplay, TV interviews, a number one spot on iTunes and a big thumbs-up from the consumer.
Over the past three months Colenso BBDO and Frucor have been conducting a very public experiment to create a system that could translate the body’s movements into a music track. The team hacked Kinect motion tracking software and combined it with Ableton audio production software. It then took slick dancing to perform the track live. Rather than keeping it as one, fairly impressive, stunt that would have certainly turned a few heads, the brand invited the public to witness the journey with a series of webisodes.
The webisodes have now had over 100,000 views online and have been shared on countless sites and blogs. The personal, transparent style of the interviews and highly talented crew of technology developers, audio engineers, motion artists, visual designers and music producers has engaged consumers and media across New Zealand. When the technology was finally tamed and the stunt performed it went viral instantly.
The track “Can’t Help Myself” now tops the Electronic iTunes chart in New Zealand. The campaign has ensured that the brand is now very much associated with its target audience of young, trend-setting and, of course, energetic Kiwi consumers.
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