Violinist Lindsey Stirling performed for Pandora listeners on Sept. 5 via one-on-one video chats. FOR fans of Pandora Media, the Internet radio service that plays music based on preferences for genres, artists and songs, no element is more familiar than tapping the thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon. Thumbing up a song, as it is known in Pandora parlance, cues an algorithm to play more songs with similar elements like tempo, instrumentation and lyrics, while thumbing down prevents the song from being played again. Since Pandora introduced its radio service in 2005, smartphone and computer listeners have clicked the icons more than 40 billion times. But for several listeners on Sept. 5, tapping the thumbs-up icon was far from mundane. After those listeners favored a song by Lindsey Stirling, a classically trained violinist who performs electronica and dance music, the song was interrupted by a recorded message from Ms. Stirling saying thanks and inviting them to video chat. Listeners who did so may have expected a prerecorded video, but soon Ms. Stirling, who was in a studio in Los Angeles with a keyboardist and percussionist, appeared on each participant’s screen. First they chatted, then she performed the song “Shatter Me. “ Seven audience-of-one concerts occurred over about three hours, and are featured in a new advertising campaign, the first for the radio service.
“It ended with cheers and sometimes, tears,”says screen text in a new commercial, which shows one woman seen on her device’s camera applauding and another dabbing her eyes. “But it all started,”the text continues, with someone clicking a thumbs-up button. A link at the close of the commercial, which functions as a preview, takes viewers to a longer video, where Ms. Stirling faces a monitor the size of a movie screen, and each listener, upon seeing her, is stunned.
“Oh my god, oh my god,”says one teenage girl with braces, a tie-dyed T-shirt and blue fingernail polish, raising her hands to her mouth in disbelief.
Door-size light panels encircle Ms. Stirling, and while she plays, each viewer holds up colored objects like a Post-it note or rubber ball, and then the panels turn that color. The panels also switch on and off when viewers wave their hands, conductorlike, an effect that seems like motion detection but is really lighting technicians in the studio responding manually.
The listeners, whose names were not released by the brand, are at home or work, and one man is in his parked car.
The online-only campaign, which will be introduced on Monday, is by TwoFifteenMcCann, a unit of the McCann Worldgroup division of the Interpublic Group of Companies. The advertising expenditure for the campaign, which will appear on websites including BuzzFeed, Facebook and Twitter, is estimated at $5 million.
Coming commercials will follow the same format, but Pandora declined to name participating musicians. Soon, hitting thumbs-up for certain musicians – also unnamed – will result in listeners receiving “thumb gifts,”like a signed guitar from one musician and a signed guitar strap from another.
As complicated as the setup was, the purpose of the one-to-one concert effort was to illustrate a simple truth about the pleasure of the right song coming on the radio at the right time, said Simon Fleming-Wood, the chief marketing officer at Pandora. Such perfect-song serendipity is more frequent with Pandora than with traditional radio stations, or even with other customizable radio streams like those offered by Apple or Amazon, because of his company’s proprietary algorithm, Mr. Fleming-Wood said.
“We wanted to create an approach that was both innovative and thought provoking, but that also demonstrated the power of this personalization to create magic moments for our listeners,”he said. “So this is sort of an extreme example of the delight that Pandora creates for 25 million-plus people every day. “
James Robinson, chief creative officer of TwoFifteenMcCann, said the enormous monitor facing the musicians was used for a practical reason – so the violinist and the listener could be captured from the same camera angle when filming – but turned out to be an unexpectedly stirring component for Ms. Stirling.
“It was very emotional for listeners, and very emotional for Lindsey, too, because she could see them one-to-one in a way that she doesn’t even get to in a concert,”Mr. Robinson said. “She could see what her music meant to these people. “The brand hopes the video will go viral, and chose Ms. Stirling, who competed on “America’s Got Talent” on NBC in 2010, in part because of the splash she has made on social media. Ms. Stirling’s YouTube channel has about 5. 4 million subscribers, and her videos collectively have garnered more than 752 million views. Pandora, the leading Internet radio service with more than 76 million listeners tuning in at least once a month and more than a million songs in its collection, had revenues of $413. 2 million in the first six months of 2014, an increase of 54 percent over the first half of 2013, it reported in financial filings. While some revenue came from subscriptions that enable ad-free listening and enhanced sound quality, 77 percent of it was from advertising. Most of the advertising revenue historically came from Pandora’s computer-based platforms, but today, with the popularity of smartphones and tablets, mobile advertising accounts for 76 percent of ad revenue. Peter Shankman, a customer service and marketing analyst, reviewed the new campaign, and said the way it captured the emotional impact of music reminded him of a 2012 viral video in which a nursing home resident who was nearly catatonic grew animated upon hearing music from his youth. “This is very smart and makes an emotional connection, and there are very few things that can give you that emotional connection like music can,”Mr. Shankman said of the Pandora campaign. “This is a heartstrings play, and it works really well. “Source link