Channel 4, Atlantic Records and the7stars boldly went where no musician has gone before to create the world's first ever interactive music TV advert, giving viewers the chance to choose which track from Ed Sheeran's new album 'X' he played live for the very first time with the aim of boosting album sales.
Ed Sheeran: Live
The Big Idea
Ed is an artist renowned for putting his fans first, playing over 300 gigs (some at very intimate locations) in one year which has created a very personal connection with fans. But, with fame, this connection becomes challenged and the core fans’ engagement with an artist can be diluted.
Our idea was to re-kindle that personal connection by turning mass broadcast on its head. We’d re-engage fans by creating the world’s first interactive full-length music TV advert. Taking the idea of a song-request, for the first time we would get Ed’s fans to choose the track they wanted to hear him play – in real-time.
Enter E4 and the Big Bang Theory; the single biggest show on E4 and fundamentally in Ed fans’ universe. We ran a bespoke 20” ad solus in the going in break and in the centre break. This saw Ed explaining how fans could vote (from a choice of 3 songs) via Twitter to hear him play an acoustic version of a track from the album at the end of the show – taking over the full ad break. This would be a world premiere of Ed performing the song and the campaign would seamlessly join TV and social second-screening to create a two-way conversation between Ed and his fans.
Making it Happen
With only 3 weeks collaboration, one of the biggest tasks was delivering the advert live – with only one week from sign-off to live date. Spreadfast not only needed to verify the votes in real time, but had to be plugged into C4 commercial operations to broadcast the correct song within a matter of minutes!
On the night, all parties were on stand-by. C4 and Twitter live-tweeted, kick-starting one of the most successful social vote adverts. As the unique break approached viewing went up with the end break seeing an additional 400,000 viewers tuning into the ad break to see his performance. Shazam tags allowed fans to delve deeper linking out to Ed’s YouTube Channel – where they could see more.
The Results
The results exceeded all expectations, and response to the interactive advert was phenomenal on social media! Highlights from the results included hashtag votes reaching trending status in the UK, with both #EdSong1 and #EdSong3 trending, next day digital sales increasing and hitting over 7% above forecast, and the live break was Shazamed 5.5K times and ‘Sing’, the first single from the album, became Ed Sheeran’s first ever Number 1 single.
Overall, 'X’ became Number 1 in the UK Official Album Chart with sales of 182,427; the highest selling week one of 2014. Week one sales for ‘X’ sold more than the rest of the top 34 combined, and it was the fastest downloaded album ever.
