Creating Sustainable Social Experience Through Quality Consumer Word of Mouth: VIBE Goes Viral

Challenge:

VIBE was seeking a differentiated experience targeting the urban community. They required user-generated video to support their Rap Battle Contest and consumer traction for their sponsor, the new AT&T. The content had to be free of copyright material; submissions had to align with sponsors’ requirements, and the initial influencers had to be quality independent artists. UnBound was tasked to acquire the social influencers and launch the campaign.

Position and Solution:

Using UnBound’s proprietary social mapping algorithm called Tsunami enabled the social mapping of artists and fans identifying the social influencers. The entire program was launching on a turnkey vertical social networking platform enabling video voting and widgets sharing supporting pre-roll advertisements, as well as user profile ads.

The combination of a sticky site along with viral targeting pulled together like-minded individuals, producing a robust social experience. All content submissions were fully controlled, protecting the brand and keeping the quality at level bring in more artists/fans demonstrating to the community that Vibe Verses was the real deal.

The artists applied their own Rap lyrics over MP3 tracks provided, circumventing any copyright issues and enabling the winners to be placed on iTunes. Both artists and fans pushed the video widget out to the urban community, creating the viral traction required.

Results:

Starting with just fewer than 21M targeted artists ultimately resulting in over 1.2MM video streams, 40M registered users, and 26M Widget views per day in just 36 days. Post the 36-day initial launch, the total reached 64M consumer registrations. This was compared to just 10M video streams a month, adding in the viral outreach and word of mouth produced a 100 times lift. Due to the consumer traction, the social contest site was left intact, and Vibe Verses II launched with a new contest.

Credit Information
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Client: Vibe Media Group LLC
Agency: UnBound Technologies, Inc.
Budget: Range from $250,000 to $50,000
Date of Campaign: 2007-Present