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. 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.
Lincoln used UNBOUND Technologies’ Social Search and Analysis solutions to identify and analyze this community and determine its top affinities, or what members are “into.” After discovering that one of the key affinities was soul, jazz, and R&B, Lincoln used UNBOUND’s technology to identify the most socially-connected (and influential) independent music artists in those genres. Lincoln then engaged these artists through a contest that included a top prize of $10,000 plus the opportunity to open for Common at one of his 2008 performances. A widget was used to share videos from friend-to-friend and drive traffic to Lincolnlounge.com.
The results for the three-month campaign were remarkable—with more than 650,000 widget views within the target demographic and a quadrupling of the number of unique visitors exposed to the Lincoln brand.
Commenting on the campaign, Tom Grill, Lincoln Brand Manager, said, "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 lincolnlounge.com users who now can collaborate with existing users and interact socially around our brand."
