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Sam Smith Google Entertainment Marketing: Movies, TV, Music and Gaming

Google Play on mission to 'disrupt' traditional music marketing campaigns

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By Ishbel Macleod, PR and social media consultant

May 30, 2014 | 3 min read

Google Play is set to run a three and a half minute, live music ad during Alan Carr’s Chatty Man tonight, to help promote its music offering.

The ad will see Brit Award winner Sam Smith perform one of his songs live at a gig in London.

Henry Jones, marketing manager at Google Play, told The Drum: “We’re always keen to do things a little bit different and a little bit new. We’ve been working with the labels for some time now and we’re keen to do something a bit different and bring fans closer to the music and the artist they love.

“It’s a new kind of way of doing things in an old-fashioned format, and that’s what really excites us about this opportunity.”

The aim of the brand campaign is to promote artists such as Smith to those who may never have heard of their music.

“We’re obviously hoping that Sam’s fan based is interested in this, but there will be a whole new audience [from the Alan Carr show]. It may be people hearing about Google Play for the first time, and this will hopefully get them to try out the service as well.

“Our target audience is anyone who loves music really. We don’t want to exclude anyone from enjoying music in any way they can. Obviously the Android user base is thee and ready made for us, the people there are just one click away from Google Play and they may not know it. We need to raise awareness for those guys, but beyond that we just want any music fan out there to benefit from what we do and benefit out of these cool opportunities.”

With 90 per cent of music downloads taking place on mobile, Jones stressed the differences between Google Play and other download sites – specifically that Play allows users to both stream and download music.

This may be the first time that a live TV ad has been shown, but Jones predicts that it won’t be the last: “If we see other people try it then that is a great success metric for us really. And you know what they say – imitation is the greatest form of flattery.”

However, it is not something that Google Play plans to repeat any time soon: “I don’t necessarily think we’ll do a live TV ad again straight away. We were excited by the fact that it was the first and we don’t want to repeat – but we have a few things coming together that we hopefully will be able to come out with soon enough,” he said.

While Jones could not reveal any plans for upcoming marketing campaigns, he did hint that this was “the first of many collaborations” regarding music and artists, and that there were “big plans” for the coming year.

Sam Smith Google Entertainment Marketing: Movies, TV, Music and Gaming

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