O2 Academy

Background

At the end of 2008 O2 took a stronghold on the UK’s live music scene with the announcement of the partnership with the Academy Music Group. All 11 Carling Academies became O2 Academy . The key target for the Academy music venues is 16-24 year olds, notoriously difficult to engage with and with a cynical attitude to brands piggybacking stuff they think is cool. The sponsorship of Skins gave fantastic access to the demographic, but we understood we had to work harder than just entertaining our audience to truly engage them with the brand. Armed with the knowledge that this target is hugely active online and traffic to the Ch4 Skins website sees a dramatic spike before, during and after weekly episodes (with over 100,000 users going online to discuss what they’ve seen and discover additional content) we devised a strategy to generate conversations and get the audience to actually participate in the story of the idents. Within the ident scripts, our characters Zak and Jim refer to a character known as ‘Big Dave’. Big Dave is a mythical geezer who could ‘sort you out’ with tickets. His e-mail was subtly featured on the wall of several idents and if viewers noticed the e-mail and contacted it, they’d be rewarded with an email from Big Dave telling them to go to o2academy.co.uk/bigdave. Here they could register to ‘see what he could do for them’. This entered the viewer into an exclusive draw for tickets to an O2 Academy of their choice.