Branded entertainment takes centre stage at the C/O Pop conference

Branded entertainment takes centre stage at the C/O Pop conference


C/O Pop, the music festival and conference held in Cologne since 2004 has opened for its 11th edition. The conference, which is the music industry-oriented part of the event, was introduced by the organisers, Ralph Christoph and Fabian Gerhartz.

Christoph remarked that this year’s edition of the festival marks the first time that an industry event in Germany had a full day dedicated to the topic of branded entertainment.

The conference has also worked hard on bringing in speakers from all over the world and is hosting a series of “Out of Germany” sessions. There, speakers from traditional markets like the USA and France but also emerging markets like the Baltic region, Colombia and Chile aim to break down to conference attendees how to bring their music to those countries.

Although I can only report on the English-language part of the program dedicated to branded entertainment, that still made for a packed day.

Red Bull Academy

The conference was kick-started by Torsten Schmidt from the consultancy company Yadastar. If you haven’t heard of Yadastar (a Cologne-based company) you’ll have probably heard of the Red Bull Academy program that they developed for the brand. Thorsten delved deep into the dynamics of the Academy explaining how Red Bull got its impetus to work in music because of the amount of business it was doing with clubs and venues. The company was already an expert in working in the sports vertical where the competitions model worked well, but it didn’t work as well in culture and so Yadastar had to come up with something different.

Their approach was to let the people who would ordinarily hate for a brand to get involved in the music space come up with something and eventually the Academy was born. Schmidt said that the project was allowed to live under the radar for a long time without having the pressure of needing to show results straight away, but those results were abundant and clear especially after the Red Bull Academy in New York, since for example the brand managed to get 8 dedicated articles on the New York Times where previously the had’t gotten any attention from the paper.

The continued success of the Red Bull Music Academy has become a reference point for brands that want to get involved in music and have an “authentic” feel, but the fact remains that few brands have the courage to embark on a multi-year plan without having a clear idea of what the returns may be which is why the success stories of Red Bull and Converse for example are still isolated cases.

Massivemusic

The day continued with a presentation from Hans Brouwer, founder of Massivemusic, an Amsterdam-based company with offices all over the world, 50 people on staff and about 100 composers worldwide.

Massivemusic provides sonic branding and music strategy services working as the music agency for Heineken worldwide for example, it also looks after composition and production of bespoke pieces and finally works on creative search and licensing.

The company secures hundreds of syncs every year and Hans shared that they started an independent library of unsigned artists with two dedicated members of staff that search the web for unsigned talent and sign those artists on only for sync purposes. If the track does sync they do a 50/50 revenue share with the artist. Definitely interesting to see how an agency that is able to deliver on time and on spec managed to scale so quickly and although the company has flown under-the-radar to a degree Massivemusic is one to watch.

Song, Spot and Synch

After the presentation Hans joined the “Song, Spot and Synch” panel that also included Kyle Hopkins, Head of Music Supervision at Microsoft and Xbox, Sat Bisla, founder of A&R Worldwide, Nadin Lefkeli, Music and Business Director at White Horse Music and Natasha Baldwin, Group President for Creative and Marketing at the IMAGEM Music Group.

The panel addressed some of the key issues in the evolution of music synchronisation over the past few years.

Natasha Baldwin remarked that pricing for music syncs has become more competitive as music is becoming much more readily available, but that from a global perspective there are new markets like Brazil and Russia that are very interesting in terms of money going in from brands that could potentially be available for artists.

Nadin Lefkeli talked about the need to take a global perspective when looking at licenses. She said since these days it is rare for a campaign to be limited to the one advert and it is therefore important for brands and agencies to look at getting bigger packages for the music so that they don’t have to keep re-negotiating the license to accommodate different types of usage.

Kyle Hopkins, talking about how deals have evolved stated that every single music placement he works on is negotiated individually. He said that sometimes situations present themselves where the company may not have the budget that would be necessary for a track but by being honest and upfront with rights holders about his budgets and trying to work out how to add more value to a particular placement he is often able to find a way to make the deals happen. He also commented on the fact for people that work in synchronisation relationships in the industry are everything and so for him it’s very important that all parties come out of a transaction happy, not just the company that he represents, because he knows that in a week’s time he’d have to get another deal done with the same rights holders.
Nadin Lefkeli also remarked on the importance of have upfront conversations about budgets in order to avoid lengthy negotiations.

Bands can use sync as a tool (when they are in a position to do so) during their release campaign, Natasha Baldwin pointed out that Daft Punk were very strategic in their music placements, they refused all sync requests as the album was riding high in the charts but then started approving selected requests as “Get Lucky” started dropping off the charts in order to revive interest in the song.

All the panelists agreed on something that the industry should be proud of: conversations over the last few years have become a lot more direct and transparent in the sync space. Labels and publishers are more sensitive to the fact that different branded projects have different budgets and sometimes they may accept a lower payout than they may have considered a few years ago if they are working with a trusted partner and they realise that they are being given the entirety of the available budget. At the same time brands also recognise that it’s important to keep the relationship a two way street and are often committing to assist the artist in promotional activities around the music, even pushing it through the brand’s social media channels for example - although the “promotional” benefits of a campaign are not often part of the negotiations unless dealing with an emerging artist that can truly benefit from it.

Music Activation for Brands

The final panel of the day - Music Activation for Brands - was moderated by Jeremy Barker from the London-based music consultancy Frukt. He was joined by Zoe Stainsby, Global Music Marketing Manager at Coca Cola, Greg Sato, Levi’s head of Global Entertainment Strategy and Alan Miller, co-founder of the LA-based creative agency Collide.

Both Coca Cola and Levi’s obviously enjoy the benefits of a brand history that has long passed the 100-year mark. Zoe Stainsby commented on the fact that she had to continue a legacy of music partnerships that is especially strong at Coca Cola and that music continues to be a n.1 priority for the company into the future as it was recently identified as a key passion point for teenagers who are a key target audience.

Greg Sato described the company’s efforts in entertainment marketing as being mostly focused on its Haus of Strauss project that got started three years ago. The brand decided that while it was important to understand its heritage, they shouldn’t let that heritage drive their strategy so they decided to be at the forefront of new music. Even though Levi’s didn’t place music front and centre in its marketing effort they found that the most authentic expressions of Levi’s were within the music space and in that sense music can help the brand tell its story. He made a case and point talking about the Coachella festival where fashion is super-important, this is an event where Levi’s wants to be present not just during but also before as people hunt for their “festival outfits.”

Alan Miller talked about how brands can discover their own story and in his opinion they need to look at what their objectives are and what they want to achieve. He also remarked that while a lot of clients want to reach millennials, that’s actually quite a generic terms spanning people ranging from 17 to 30 who have different needs and should therefore be further segmented in order to reach them effectively.

For Greg Sato everything they do at Levi’s has to be product-centric but that doesn’t have to necessarily mean over-branding or in-your-face branding, he stated that there are ways of doing it that make it feel authentic.

Zoe talked about Coca Cola’s campaign for the Burn energy drink and how they partnered with Avicii when he was still an up-and-coming artist which ended up being of great value to the band. This highlighted how brands can really benefit from promoting and partnering with emerging artists. Greg echoed her thoughts stating that Levi’s does not align itself with massive artists but rather focuses on building organic relationships. Perhaps controversially he revealed that Levi’s does not actually pay a lot of the emerging artists that it associates with but rather the relationship is a trade-off as artists receive vast amount of promotion and exposure on the brands’ social media channels and that in turn can help them to break.

In terms of what brands are doing wrong, Alan Miller said that brands shouldn’t do things that are not a part of what they do, highlighting the recent partnership between a sake company and Cee Lo Green as something that didn’t work because there was no real reason for those two entities to work together.

The importance of sticking to a brand’s core values and image without wavering in the face of short-term trends seemed to be a mantra at the session. Following trends can give the brand a temporary boost, but if the brand needs to keep changing its image to follow new trends that is bound to confuse consumers as to what that brand is all about and ultimately has a negative impact.

Another takeaway from the session was that that in spite of all the data that is available to brands like Coca Cola and Levi's today it is still very hard to create a cause-effect relationship between content marketing efforts and sales aside from very specific, isolated cases.

C/O Pop continues today - the 22nd of August - in Cologne.


(Andrea Leonelli)