Every Australian has a favourite Powerballad. You know the one? The song that gets everyone on their feet at the end of the night and unites the pub dancefloor, regardless of age. That’s why Powerball joined forces with BRING and Spotify to find Australia’s biggest fan-voted track, partnering with ARIA award winning punk/rock favourites, DZ Deathrays to transform the track in their own unique way.
Challenge
Powerball needed to grow brand awareness, social credibility and favourability amongst the next generation of Powerball players. The primary objective was to grow spontaneous brand awareness by 7 pts to 35%. We sought to do this by building fame around the core message that Powerball isn’t just a lottery game; it’s the chance to play by your own rules and follow your true passions in life. To achieve this and bring Powerball into the cultural zeitgeist, we tapped into a universal passion of our target audience: music.
Solution
Carat and its content division The Story Lab (TSL) partnered with music partners BRING and Spotify to unlock how we could put a Powerball ‘spin’ on music. Regardless of whose rules you play by, some songs make any Aussie stop and sing along – think ‘The Horses’ or ‘You’re the Voice’. Enter the Powerball ‘Powerballad’ and the idea to pay tribute to one of Australia’s biggest classics, only reimagined by another band’s own rules.
A digital-only campaign is almost unheard of from this category but this type of approach allowed us to push the boundaries further for the ‘Play By Your Own Rules’ brand platform – which has a unique and bold attitude.
Partnering with a trusted digital content partner (Spotify), we were able to shift the dial on the brand perception and effectively paint the Powerball brand in a new light to a new generation of digital-savvy players.
Results
- 6.59M Spotify users were reached with 16M impressions
- Delivered $142K of added value.
- A strong platform laid in Phase 1 of the campaign, with 7.45M media impressions across targeted and sponsorship assets.
- Resulted in 585 track submissions, and 258 competition entries.
- Incredible conversion rate of 42% - almost unheard of for a ’25-words-or-less’ entry format. Of the targeted placements, engagement (CTR) exceeded Spotify benchmarks by 67% resulting in 387K completed video views.
During Phase 2, Run to Paradise was added to over 2,600 playlists on Spotify and was featured on Triple M commercial radio. Our original 50,000-listen goal was eclipsed 3 weeks into the campaign; and at time of writing the song listen count is over 109,000!
In Phase 3, the Powerball Powerballad branded playlist had 184K minutes streamed – that’s 3,066 hours, or 127 days of streaming.
Across Spotify, a Neilsen Brand Effectiveness study was run to determine campaign effectiveness across 1,344 respondents for our metrics of awareness, credibility and favourability.
Ad recall rose +15 points, compared to +12-point average. Intent rose +5 points, compared to +2 average, and association of Powerball with ‘Play By Your Own Rules’ was also up +5 points on the control group.
To further support these results, Powerball’s ongoing brand study through Kantar recorded a 10-percentage-point increase in Spontaneous Awareness for Powerball amongst the core target audience (18-29 and 30-44). That’s 1.4 times greater than our briefed target objective!