A Source Of Inspiration

I’m back to work, but the stories from last week rock festival are not over yet. The nice folks at Torke Stunt did a cool ambient/guerrilla marketing stunt, with a rugby team delighting the short people that didn’t stood at the front rows.

Challenge
Optimus is a mobile phone company based in Portugal. Our task was to create a brand experience targeted to young people within a big music festival context.

Solution
Under the brand’s tagline:”Experience it”,a service called “Broad Shoulders” was created. Ten big men offered their Broad Shoulders for people to climb in order to see better the concerts or just to find a lost friend amongst the crowd.

Results
This service was greatly accepted by young people, creating word of mouth in the three days of the music festival as more people were asking for the Broad Shoulders service.

Things have been rather quiet around here since i took some days off to put my body and soul on the best rock festival in Portugal: Super Bock Super Rock (aka SBSR). From a traditional advertising point of view, events like these are a great chance to interact with a young audience and reinforce their message, with beer brand Super Bock sponsoring the festival in the 13th edition. And what about the rock festival web neighborhood?

Since it’s a better task than trying to review the concerts (I’m a humble amateur music critic), i propose a short tour by the websites of bands that played at act II of the event, leaving out the bands with only a MySpace profile, that is becoming a trivia instrument in music marketing.

So, here is the web-gig:

Day I

The Gift

thegift.pt

Starting with a portuguese band, with a website featuring the usual sections such as info, tour dates, video or wallpapers: There’s one interesting addition by providing a Creative Commons page, where the are listed the authorized uses of their materials. With an active forum and allowing users to shop merchandise the band from Alcobaça has an overall coherent presence on the web, and i could only wish Sónia (the lead singer) would post more often on the blog. And as much as i like their music, it would help if there was some easy way to turn off the background music.

The Klaxons

klaxons.net

Another regular music website, with press-releases, band tour dates and with a weird name - Jazzanauts - for the mailing-list. The design is based mostly on the
collage/grunge look, that i suspect is another shared asset between Simon and Lovefoxxx.

Bloc Party

blocparty.com

You can always expect good taste from a band using great typography in their brand (the font looks like Avenir, from Adrian Frutiger). With a high-contrast homepage (yellow on dark brown), they give us a large video player, with several video clips that would be a great experience on a Joost channel. Bloc party were also one of the initial bands profiled on Virb, the uber-cool social network.
Speaking of social network, Bloc Party has one killer feature, the Marshals, were fans are invited to post their own reviews to concerts. It’s kind of a forum, but more focused and superbly designed.

Arcade Fire

arcadefire.com

The only word i can say: amazing. Ok, i’m a bit suspicious since i’m a long time fan, and sometimes even post at the official forum ArcadeFire.net. But anyway, the Montreal folks (where else could they come from), have some beautiful illustrations on the official website with regularly updated scrapbooks and some fine photos by the members. Arcade Fire web crew did also some notable viral stunts, such as releasing a website with a toll-free number where you could listen to tracks of the album Neon Bible, or leaking over 100 songs on MySpace under fake band names to find the most popular songs for the new album.
At the Lisbon gig, they picked up a video on YouTube with a demoniac possession as an entry of their show, that was featured before at the release of Neon Bible and was now replaced by another weird video of popular culture.

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I already enjoyed the music, but i never imagined she had such a acid-retro site. How cool is that :)

Setting the stage for the release of the new album Kala in August, M.I.A. relaunched a site that is something between a souk and a indian market, blended with massive amounts of arcade games, surrounded by hallucinogenic animated gifs. But gosh, do i love this stuff. It’s almost as good as the 2012 London Olympic logo :)

As it should be, the myspace profile and the cover art also have the same retro-kashbah-tech look.

If you’re a young teenager, with high levels of testosterone, then you’ll surely appreciate this one from Axe. Heck, even i enjoyed the fine details they did at axebcww.com, a multi-language site, with 4 girls singing their sexy new music in their world tour.

Even if Axe is setting the objectification of women to higher levels, you’ve got to love that funny tune. I confess - i’ve downloaded the ringtone. The video is all “Destinys Child like”, well produced and - imagine this - with a plot.

On a side note, the site was found through axeads Blog, where you find this and other ads by the Unilever deodorant brand and some of them are even good. Bom Chicka Wah Wah.

Ad

Last April, after the show from CSS at LuxFragil, i gazed at the merchandising at the lobby. Trendy design, i thought. Well, it surely is, since the controversial 2012 Olimpics logo seems to have been designed by Lovefoxxx and company.

Well, it wasn’t. Instead Wolf Ollins was paid £400,000 to design the new branding that is causing quite a buzz, with online petitions to its withdrawal, with signs that it may be causing epilepsy.

As a souvenir, the video of the show, from the great Brazilian band Cansei de Ser Sexy (Tired of Being Sexy), at Lisbon.

While all the fuss over last week around multi-touch screens was due to the announcement by Microsoft of Surface, other similar interfaces deserve their share of credit. One of the most notable ones is Reactable, the table that creates music.

It was with big surprise that I’ve found the installation this Saturday at ZdB (Galeria Zé dos Bois), performing their collaborative music in the table top multi-touch interface. In a talk with Sergi and Marcos, they shared a bit of the history of the 4 years research project of the Music Technology Group within the Audiovisual Institute at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona Spain. While only performing live for 1,5 years, the research is now already 4 years old, with development based on C++ with open-source software reactiVision, with a camera underneath detecting the objects location and orientation.

Basic Demo video

Improvisation Demo video

At the performance Marcos and Sergi placed different objects or sound generators (aka fiducial) on top of the multi-touch table, and while quite experimental it surely is a great way to produce music as shown by Icelandic singer and performer Bjork that will be using the tabletop during the “Volta” tour. As for a more commercial applications, Marcos explained me that more robust table could be built to ensure a safe experimentation by larger audiences (children mostly). oh, you can even try and build one yourself.

Fallon UK won last week the One Show Award for Exceptional Innovation in Media & Marketing , with their Tate Modern campaign. The project invited music artists such as Chemical Brothers or The Klaxons to produce of a series of new music tracks inspired by works at the gallery.

It’s a bit old news, since the website is online since September, sharing the exclusive tracks, that were first available only to the visitors to listen at the gallery. Check video below for the full case study.

It’s interesting to see that collaborations between popular culture, advertising and brands are becoming more frequent. Whether it’s guerrilla or a new use of media (check also the Newsbreaker action), the future of advertising is increasingly searching for references in popular culture and inviting citizens to be/make the advertising experience.

I’m a sucker for soundtracks as they’re usually offer a great selection of music. And if you happen (as i am) to be a fan of Heroes, then you definitely have to check this blog: http://heroessongs.blogspot.com/

It’s a great community work, and provides direct links to free MP3s. My favorite tune of all episodes still is Eyes from Rogue Wave, that you can listen at the band’s MySpace page. While you’re waiting for the next episode, how about listening to this heroic playlist?

Just in case anyone is interested in the singles, below are my favorite Heroes to tracks and albums by Rogue wave, Sigur Ros and Imogen Heap.: