Jael Gadsden

‘LINCOLN SPOTLIGHT SHINES ON NEW TALENT’ MUSIC VIDEO COMPETITION USES UNBOUND TECHNOLOGIES SOLUTION

Social Media Intelligence Innovator’s Technology Plays Key Role in Dynamic Lincoln/Common Outreach Campaign

www.unboundtech.com

Hollywood Winner

West Hollywood, Calif. resident and aspiring lyricist Jael Gadsden was chosen the grand champion of the Lincoln Spotlight online music competition by a panel that included Grammy Award-winning hip-hop superstar Common, Grammy-winning music producer Bryan Michael Cox, VIBE magazine editor-in-chief Danyel Smith, music executive Derek Dudley and renowned DJ Tony Touch. Gadsden earned a prize of $10,000 and an opening spot for hip-hop superstar Common at one of his 2008 performances.

To increase brand awareness among a target audience of affluent African Americans ages 24-45, luxury automaker Lincoln and Grammy Award winner Common launched the nationwide “Lincoln Spotlight” contest to select the best and brightest music talent.

In addition to the primary campaign goal to build awareness and community around the Lincoln luxury automobile brand, Lincoln also wanted to drive traffic to its lifestyle site, www.lincolnlounge.com, and increase membership within that community. And Lincoln wanted to accomplish these goals as cost-effectively and efficiently as possible.

Aspiring artists were asked to create a video and lyrics around one of Lincoln’s four brand truths—advancing the American dream, exploring what it means to reach higher, daring to do more, and taking pride in one’s history—for one of 10 music tracks provided by Lincoln. Their fans were then encouraged to vote for their favorites at the lincolnlounge.com lifestyle site. The artists were also provided a widget that enabled them to share their video with their fans who, in turn, shared the widget with their friends and friends-of-friends. These friends then went to LincolnLounge.com where they would register to join the Lincoln community, listen to the video entries and vote for their favorite artist. Online viewer voting helped determine the top five finalists. Judging was based on originality and creativity, verbal technique and visual sophistication.

Data Mapping MySpace, Facebook For the campaign, UNBOUND Technologies provided the tools to analyze the online social presence of African American Lincoln enthusiasts through consumer affinity (shared interests) data maps made from MySpace, Facebook and other social network websites. The results for the three-month campaign were remarkable—with more than 775,000 widget views within the target demographic and a quadrupling of the number of unique visitors exposed to the Lincoln brand.

Common

Summary of Campaign Results:

• 775,000 widget views • 313,000 page views (display ads) • 170,000 videos streamed (with pre-rolls of Lincoln product) • 59,000 unique visitors • 7,680 new members of the Lincoln Lounge community • 87% of the participants were the targeted audience sought

www.unboundtech.com

Unbound Finds Right Affinity In creating this campaign, the first step that Lincoln and its agency, the UniWorld Group (UWG), took was to use UNBOUND technology to identify the specific target audience in the UNBOUND Social Graph, a huge database of detailed demographic, geolocation and affinity information on 200+ million social network users. They then used UNBOUND’s Social Search and Analysis solutions to analyze and rank affinities within this target demographic, discovering that it was “into” R&B, soul and jazz. As a result, the campaign was designed around this affinity.

Plan of Action To locate and register contestants, UNBOUND provided access to the millions of profiles available on MySpace and other popular social networks, and then identified, connected with and engaged targeted consumers found on these sites. UNBOUND enabled Lincoln to pinpoint the most influential, socially connected African American Lincoln enthusiasts in their social graph and motivate them to participate in the Lincoln Spotlight Contest. In the process of reaching out to potential contest participants, UNBOUND:

•  Identified the exact target audience of African American Lincoln enthusiasts on MySpace based on criteria matched to specific demographics, psychographics, affinities, locations, etc. •  Determined the target audience’s Lincoln-related affinities—their mutual attraction to others with a shared interest in all things Lincoln. •  Identified Key Influencers within this ad-hoc “virtual” community. •  Incentivized those Key Influencers to expose their fan/follower bases to the Lincoln Spotlight Contest by communicating to friends and to friends-of-friends. •  Matched incentives to Lincoln-oriented consumer affinities. •  Employed "Viral Seeding/ Word of Mouth" techniques—Key Influencers told fans, fans told friends, who told their friends, etc. •  Wrapped the campaign messaging into interactive, shareable Widgets—attractive mini-applications with graphical user interface elements that displayed Lincoln Spotlight contest information and provided a specific way for users to interact with the campaign by responding to other user actions, accepting invitations and recommendations from Influencers to participate in the contest, and inviting others to join in. •  Widgets distributed virally. •  Empowered the audience to participate in the conversation about the contest.

As momentum grows with the Lincoln brand, our approach is to create innovative efforts, such as this digital initiative, to connect our brand to a targeted customer base. With Lincoln Spotlight, not only were we able to create a platform to celebrate music and music lovers, but we also successfully built a very targeted community of new users who now can collaborate with existing users and interact socially around our brand.

—Tom Grill, Lincoln Brand Manager

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” Seed Strategy The campaign’s seed strategy was, first and foremost, based on clearly understanding the target audience’s affinities and influencers. The detailed consumer knowledge provided by UNBOUND Technologies’ Social Graph database enabled campaign strategists to create highly relevant messaging that quickly and decisively engaged the audience and incentivized great numbers of artist-influencers to participate. This in-depth knowledge, coupled with widget technology that enabled viral dissemination of the videos on MySpace, resulted in rapid viral ignition for this campaign.

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