The Objective

In the fall of 1999 Sony Music Corporation was looking for a more accountable way to spend their advertising dollars to showcase their many artists.  Sony approached our team with the following challenge:

“Develop a direct to consumer approach to the Sony brand that would subsidize the advertising spend through direct sales and retail.”

The Competitive Edge Solution

Working with the Sony team, we created a series of 60 second spots that featured unique 800 numbers and websites in order to track the actual sales attributed to the media spend.  We started with an initial test budget, we then put together a media plan based on past history and Nielsen demographic information.

We then created a set of analytics and reporting that incorporated the direct sales numbers from the following sources:

• Inbound sales generated by the unique 800 numbers.
• Web sales generated by the creative.
• Nielsen SoundScan numbers.

Nielsen SoundScan is an information system that tracks sales of music and music video products throughout the United States and Canada. Sales data from point-of-sale cash registers is collected weekly from over 14,000 retail, mass merchant and non-traditional (on-line stores, venues, etc.) outlets. 

By accessing this information, our team was able to establish a baseline at retail for each campaign prior to the launch and then track the impact the campaign had on retail sales each week as the campaign was running.  This is just one of the ways our team thinks outside the box in order to provide our clients with accountable advertising solutions that focus on bottom line results.

The Result

Since the inception of the direct response approach implemented by our team and Sony, the company now uses this same formula for success with labels such as BMG and others.  Today, Sony has it’s own in house department called “Sony Music Direct” and has been credited with creating a paradigm shift in the way that music companies introduce music to the marketplace.