Usually the chattering, excited and snaking queue outside Islington’s Union Chapel are waiting in anticipation for a one off performance by a favourite band. Having been to numerous showcases there over the years, I love the dappled light through the stained glass and soft reverberation of the lofty church ceiling. It’s the perfect venue to experience bands like Elbow or even REM many moons ago.

This crowd however, was in the line for a very different kind of live show. It was the first night of the School of Life Live tour, and replacing screeching rock frontmen would be philosophers, psychiatrists and modern day technology gurus, and their lyrics would be derived from a new-school series of self-help books.

School of Life is the brainchild of Alain de Botton, a prolific thinker and author of inspiring books including The Art of Travel and The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. It’s perhaps explained best in terms of a recent Intelligence Squared debate in which he proposed that religion has a great many benefits to society, in terms of guidance, philosophy, morality and more general support in our modern complex lives. But where do you go if you don’t believe in a deity as an increasing number of people in Europe now claim according to both census and church reports?

Mr de Botton conceived The School of Life; a physical space hosting a book shop, café and various rooms within which a programme of talks, courses and seminars are held every day. The curriculum is managed by several faculties (the lexicon they use parallels that of a traditional university) and covers thoughts on coping with many aspects of the modern condition; how to move on post relationship break up, career choice, retraining your brain and predictably a selection on the theme of managing stress. They also run monthly Sunday Secular Sermons, with past speakers including Grayson Perry and Rory Sutherland delivering the ‘sermon’, often accompanied by Status Quo or Kylie ‘hymns’.

Speakers, (or were they performers?), included Roman Krznaric talking about finding a job you love, Philippa Perry (wife of Grayson) who is a psychotherapist talking about how to stay sane and the headline act, Mr Alain De Botton “rocking the crowd” with his views on how to think about sex more.

The audience laughed, applauded spontaneously and to validate my rock and roll comparison, the lady beside me even seemed to be a sort of School of Life ‘groupie’ – howling out the names of the speakers as they took to the stage! With a thousand people paying £20 a ticket this was a commercial success as well as being a marketing exercise for the series of books, clearly this also generates concert level revenue too, with the merch stand peddling books rather than tour t-shirts. In fact, I think they missed a trick by NOT creating tour merchandise! A similar pattern of success can be seen with the Nine Lesson and Carols for Godless People, which five years in now sells out 6 live shows each festive season – and features a variety of comedians, musicians and thinkers all united by their atheism.

But what does all this pseudo-religious activity have to do with entertainment in 2012? Well, the answer lies in the new role entertainment now plays in peoples lives, not as a passive medium, but as an active, creative entity. The perceived definition of what constitutes entertainment is broadening out rapidly, as can be seen in the blurring of genres. Comedians once restricted to nightclub venues are aping rock stars and selling out multiple stadium shows, while film has broken out of its celluloid frame into the world of performance through a variety of pop-up and secret cinema experiences.

With the desire for shared, social and life affirming experiences at an all time high, the concept of a new style of church community, one where ‘instructions for living’ are delivered by celebrity thinkers, could offer a whole new level of escapism into the great canon of entertainment.  In fact a ‘movement’ comprised of energized, whooping and laughing audiences, led by charismatic “pin-up” speakers could be the catalyst to a whole new type of Smart Entertainment – a model that inspires people to ‘think and do’ as opposed to just consume.

FRUKT has teamed up with the Music Matters conference in Singapore to take a look at key music and brand partnerships in the Asia Pacific region. Download our ‘Exclusive Brands And Music Asia Insight Report’, showcasing a wide variety of brand and artist alignments across areas such as Korea, Japan, China and the Philippines.

East meets West

With the West still getting to grips with the notion that artist/brand partnerships can help facilitate both new revenue streams and platforms for creativity, Asia in many ways has been ahead of the game. With brand alignments built into the artist business model from the offset, as much of a core component of the package as the music itself, commercial deals are widespread.

Girls Generation, for example – a group that has racked up an impressive tally of brand alignments over the years (27 just in 2011 alone) is a good benchmark for the way the Asian music business is pushing West.  The group recently made a concerted push in the USA, appearing on the ‘Late show with David Letterman’ (performing in English) as demand outside of Asia saw them releasing an album in the US.

Another massive all female group, 2NE1 (who recently netted an MTV Iggy Award in the US for ‘Best New Band in the World’) are currently being mentored and produced by will.i.am for a stateside release. Although the album is still in production, a collaborative track is already in use as part of a creative partnership with Intel.

And the list goes on with localised brands too, as Jeju Airlines inks a deal with Korean boy band Big Bang this week to act as ambassadors as it looks to broader its reach across Asia, while k-pop girl group KARA helps Unilever position the Rexena deodorant brand in Japan.

With the brand pact firmly ingrained and Asian artists vying for traction across an international market,  it’s now no longer a question of whether the musical and cultural divide will shrink between East and West, but when. The bigger question is which brands will be out in front facilitating innovative collaborations when it does.

Interested in understanding how your brand can benefit from a deeper association with music? Then download our ‘Exclusive FRUKT SXSW 2012 Insight Report’, highlighting our pick of the very best brand activations, bands, apps and music innovations during the festival.

SXSW 2012

The sprawling SXSW festival, now in its 26th year, brings in around $168 million annually to the Austin economy as thousands flock to its bustling streets to celebrate the great and good of music, film, fashion and interactivity. FRUKT, as ever, was on the ground, bumping into friends old and new and soaking up the atmosphere of this awesome festival.

With over 2,000 bands rocking out across some 92 stages and an iPhone-crippling amount of interactive content on offer, this festival is testament to the narrowing gap between Silicon Valley’s uber geeks and the low slung jeaned indie hipsters of the music world.  Throw in over 100 queue forming SXSW parties (that represent the real networking opportunities here) and this festival is a far cry from a relaxing couple of days in a field.

With cutting edge content (both music and tech) in abundance, brand activations were naturally in evidence at every turn; whether you were catching a free ride with Chevrolet, having breakfast with Monster Energy, or watching a new band at the Converse Fader Fort, Virgin Mobile’s Live House or Doritos bizarre 56-foot vending machine stage.

However, being there is merely the opening chapter of a brand’s musical story, and it will be interesting to see what brave, bold music activity follows through into 2012 from this eclectic launch pad.

The results of the 2012 consumer Superbands index, the annual consumer brands survey listing the top 500 consumer and B2B brands in the UK, were revealed yesterday. FRUKT’s Jack Horner, a judge on the Superbrands panel, was invited to pen the feature essay for this year’s accompanying book, and with the cultural spectacle that is the Olympics on every marketer’s lips, he focused his attention on the entertainment remit of these highly favoured brands.

FRUKT did a bit of digging around and found that out of the top ten brands on the 2012 Superbrands list a sizeable 90% had forged some form of alignment with entertainment, with a further 72% of the top 50 brands having utilised entertainment, be it music, film, or art, in their marketing efforts.

Whether its Rolex, Coca-Cola, BMW, John Lewis or Cadbury’s – each has seen the value in building an association with entertainment in order to reach consumers.

For example, Rolex (out in front on this year’s list) has its Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, a yearlong program of creative collaboration between upcoming artists and mentors across six disciplines – dance, film, literature, music, theatre and the visual arts. Coca-Cola is another brand that has made entertainment a core tenant of its marketing; with a rich heritage in music across the decades, from the iconic “I’d like to teach the world to sing” campaign to its broad music initiatives around the London Olympic Games. BMW, another brand riding high in the Superbrands list, has championed innovative new filmmakers, commissioned incredible art and sponsored music events over the years (BMW, for example, is currently sponsoring the London Symphony Orchestra over a three year period, facilitating a series of annual open-air concerts).

Others on the list have a more direct affiliation with entertainment, such as the BBC, which continues to pioneer new drama and deliver a diverse range of music platforms. Google is another, through its ownership of the ubiquitous video entertainment platform YouTube. In fact the rest of the top 50 list tells a very similar story; from Apple and Guinness to Nike and Jack Daniel’s, each has a foot firmly in the door of entertainment, and for good reason.

Entertainment won’t help you see through walls or leap tall buildings, but it will give you the ability to speak to your consumers in a universally understood language.

If you’re eager to get to the heart of the consumer; if you’re looking for a point of differentiation from your competitors; if you’re seeking a credible, ownable cultural asset, then there are few avenues that offer up an opportunity in the way entertainment does.

Entertainment is the emotional footprint of a brand.  With fans of music, film, fashion and sport all eager to be brought closer to the action, the talent and the spectacle, brands now find themselves in a unique position, able to tap into audiences when they are at their most passionate, driving a long-term emotional connection.

Brands have earned the right to play in the entertainment space and are now not just accepted, but also ‘expected’ to deliver and facilitate engaging entertainment content. With 91% of consumers positive about brand involvement in entertainment and culture; building, planning and defining a long-term entertainment strategy could well be what separates the brands from the super brands of the future.

As the great and the good of the music business struggle bleary eyed into work (at some point this afternoon), after one of the most important nights in the UK music calendar, just what have we learnt post event? Other than the fact One Direction can’t tell one radio station from another; Blur acceptance speeches make us thankful for TiVo; and that Adele’s 6 Grammys and 2 Brits still doesn’t guarantee her a moment in the spotlight.

Oh, and that Bruno Mars is really quite tiny.

For me at least, (watching from the comfort of my sofa) the biggest revelation of the night came not during the production, but during the ad breaks – where the music, ironically, seemed noticeably lacking.

Out of the 47 ads from 40 separate brands that featured during the Brits (excluding movie trailers and commercials for radio stations and albums), only 16 utilised any form of music – with 31 void of any soundtrack at all. Which seems somewhat bizarre given the nature of the programme.

There were naturally some notable expectations; including great work from Coca-Cola with their Olympic-focused ‘Move To the Beat’ commercial featuring Mark Ronson and Katy B, Virgin Media’s hijacking of the Yeo Valley boyband, T-Mobile’s use of Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Bonkers’ and MasterCard’s series of fan-focused bumpers.

However, on the whole the ad breaks were something of a missed opportunity with 66% devoid of a vital music element.  In fact the final ad break was almost entirely silent, bar the retro sound of T Rex during Carling’s new Chrome beer ad.

Millions of viewers are tuning in to the Brit Awards because they love music, and brands that fail to tap into this passion are missing a vital opportunity to connect with consumers on a highly personable level. With the right song and the right sentiment, a brand can turn a traditional ad break into a memorable, viral hit using it as a launch pad for a wider, long-term engagement with consumers through music.

But don’t take my word for it. Brands questioning the validity of music in their ads need look no further than Adele herself. The multi-award winning singer’s emotive performance at last year’s Brits was the catalyst to her ground breaking global success. Why? Because it spoke to people. It touched them. It made them feel something.

Which is what music – and ultimately effective marketing – is all about.

Last week was Social Media Week. It was a week of chin stroking, hypothesising, brand bashing, and Olympics scrutiny, not to mention the age-old topic of brands awkwardly  ‘jumping in’ to social with a cavalier disregard for strategic thinking, being bandied around. It would seem that some brands are consistently determined to use social media in particularly obnoxious ways, gleefully whacking “join us on Facebook!” onto the backside of all possible marketing. Truth is, we all know that brands need to incorporate social as part of the overall ‘marketing mix’ in order for it to have any relevance, it’s a given, but it appears to be easier said than done. Short term, we’ve got a few more obtuse clangers to come. Long term, we have faith there’s some good stuff on the horizon.

The concept of social censorship however, was a topic that particularly caught our attention throughout the week. We’ve been told time and again that social media is the ultimate platform for freedom of speech, but is this naïve thinking?

+ The Tuesday before last, the Guardian broke the story that broadcast news organization Sky News had sent out new social media guidelines to its staff,

+ Mark Stephens (super legal bod) told us this week that as soon as you hit return on your keyboard you’re a publisher, whether you like it or not,

+ Super injunctions suitably freaked us out about saying anything remotely punchy online for fear of contempt of court,

+ The Twitter Joke Trial (Google it) will certainly get you thinking before you tweet,

+ And we discovered that the US government monitors the tweets of people coming into the country to see if they are suitable citizens. So writing “I’m having a big blow out tonight” for instance on Twitter, could deem you a terrorist threat! (Brilliant).

Suddenly something twigged. Is the fun being sucked out of social? Is there such a thing as idle chitter chatter any more? Are we all publishers with a small ‘p’? Are our personal social media comments actually personal? And is it therefore ok for a company, organization, or brand to give us a wrist slapping for saying something on our own Facebook page that they don’t agree with?

It’s a toughy. Today, many companies, brands, and organisations actively encourage their employees to use social media. It spreads brand awareness, boosts evangelism and morale, and it’s good for recruitment. Sure, we get it, we’re a big fan. But do they then have the right to dictate what’s ok for us to say? If so, it all seems a bit archaic, like the fun sponge has taken away all the joyful innocence of ‘tagging’, ‘liking’, and ‘following’ that social media originally offered us.

Social Media Week has brought us to the realisation that social is not as open a forum as we once believed. Without our help, today’s consumers may be faced with a woeful drip of anodyne tweets to look forward to. It’s a sad state of affairs if so. But for brands, perhaps there is a real opportunity to remind consumers that social is about entertainment, that it is ok to speak freely without fear of scorn. Perhaps with the help of brands, we can put the fun back into social.

The Super Bowl is the Olympics of advertising, with brands limbering up all year for what could be their big moment of glory at an event that is about so much more than mere sport. Amongst the record breaking Twitter statistics revealed post game, 42% of tweets were about the ads, with only a mere 4% about the Giants actual win. Why? Because Super Bowl Sunday is, at its heart, not just a display of sporting prowess – it’s a shared entertainment experience, largely driven by brands.

A sizeable 73% of the 111 million strong audience tuning into the Super Bowl view the ads as a core part of the entertainment spectacle that is the big game. However, it hasn’t always been this way.

Ask anyone about the ads between 1967 (when Super Bowl was born) and 1973 and you’ll be met with blank faces. Google searches are equally unimpressive. It’s almost as if the ads never happened. Why have these ads been cast adrift in time? In truth, they just weren’t very entertaining. They sold product not people. Facts as opposed to escapism.

However, that was to change dramatically in 1973 when Farrah Fawcett teasingly applied Noxzema shaving lotion to the face of New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath. The iconic ad (although tame by today’s standards) brought the glamour and celebrity of TV entertainment crashing into the stoic world of Super Bowl advertising. The rest, as they say, is history.

Since this day Super Bowl ads have been all about entertainment, with big budgets to match the aspirations of brands eager to align with musicians, actors and celebrities in increasingly cinematic scale commercials. The problem, however, is that brands tend to put all their eggs in one very expensive basket, with the vast majority never following through with an entertainment focus during the rest of the year. Which is something of a missed opportunity.

The ads, like they did in 1973, need to move with the times. Consumers have changed their entertainment consumption habits dramatically over the last few years. It’s no longer a passive medium; they want to timeshift it, shape it, control it, share it, reach out and touch it. In short they want to feel and experience entertainment, not just consume it, and here is where the real opportunity lies for brands to strike a real connect with their intended audience.

The challenge for brands in 2012 is how to make a Super Bowl ad live outside of a short term viral spike, to deliver entertainment touch points across digital, social and experiential channels throughout the year. The big game day needs to be seen as a springboard rather than a touchdown, giving brands the right to play in the exciting and rapidly evolving entertainment space.

To find out how your brand can benefit from a long-term entertainment strategy (and to see our pick of the Super Bowl ads) download our ‘Super Bowl XLVI – Exclusive FRUKT Entertainment Insight Report’.

It doesn’t matter if you couldn’t care less about Elizabeth’s bash nor give two hoots how quickly a man you’ve never heard of can get from A to B on a stretch of track in Stratford: 2012 is set to be a big year.  And don’t the marketing men (and women) know it.

We’re set to be swamped under a deluge of marketing bumph coming in from all angles.  Some of it will cleverly relate to the Jubilee or Olympics; the very clever ones will try to allude to both; the less imaginative ones will probably not make any effort, opting to exploit the occasions without paying lip service to them.

Here at FRUKT we predict seeing more activations in unexpected places and adhering to the principle of less is more.  What serves as a better platform for this than the experiential pop up?

Pop ups are, of course, nothing new in brand world.  Following the model established by pop up retail spaces and pop up restaurants we have seen a steady influx of temporary activations designed to promote products to a temporarily engaged audience.  This spans from the lateral thinking of Nike offering massages to sporty types in the Runners Lounge, to the more intriguing marriage of whiskey and haircuts.

They are a no-brainer in many ways due their ability to appear quickly, unexpectedly and without breaking the budget.  Not only are you catching people off guard in a sure fire way to maximize impact, but you are doing so in a cost effective way.  Result.

Furthermore, it’s not solely about austerity, but also a matter of zeitgeist.  We live in fickle times, where today’s viral sensation is tomorrow’s spam, and so the immediacy of the pop up negates any fear of being out of date before you’ve had an opportunity to speak to your target market.  Pop ups appeal to the early adopter market more than most other experiential routes.  They gift the ‘discoverer’ with elevated tastemaker status and instant bragging rights, valuable currencies whether in the boozer or on social media.

The beauty of a pop up activation is that in the right location they actively take the brand to the consumer.  Yet creating an effective pop up is not as easy as filling a shipping container with gimmicky props, plonking it in a busy city centre and scrawling a logo over it.  It is paramount to consider the content inside, how this relates to the brand message and why it contributes to the economy of experience for your (potential) consumer.  For years the digital marketers told us that content was king, brands need to realise that the same principle applies in the real world.

Everyone likes a good moan in January – the seismic scale of the country’s collective Facebook grumbles probably rises to 8.9 round about…now? It’s not usually like this though. The rest of the year we can’t wait to be happy, or at least appear to be happy. Updates about spring blossom, romantic bike rides, beautiful sunsets, great food, amazing music, brilliant nights out – they are making us jealous every day. Stanford University even conducted an ‘envy study’ because positive reporting was seriously skewing our perception on real-life. So why are we so reticent to talk about the bad bits too? Because as it turns out, studies have shown that negative comments on Facebook receive more comments from friends anyway. And no-one likes a smug person.

Clearly some people are starting to see the value in misery, because, hey, people aren’t always happy and when we aren’t happy we like to club together, support each other and show we understand too. So that makes a whole group of people all in the same boat just wishing, praying, waiting for something to smile at.

Enter brand x.

Emotional baggage should actually be quite an attractive proposition to a brand. Someone in need of being cheered up gets a digital cuddle and everyone’s happy – one more like on the Facebook page and a nice positive update from a fan (which apparently will get said fan more likes too). Perhaps that’s why FRUKT have started to notice a whole load of companies popping up to offer emotional cathartism. There are sites for people to sell break up jewelry and once-loved presents in exchange for a good gripe about the ex, sites to cheer someone else up with music, sites that offer hardcore responses to bitching, and sites that are just there to hug you when you’ve had a bad day.

We can only hope for more of this in 2012 – brands that cut through the positive sheen of social media and provide a bit of a reality check and make it OK to be a bit down once in a while. Less aspirational marketing and more ‘misery’ marketing and you’ll probably find a whole heap of fans coming out the woodwork.

Next month we will once again be rolling out our annual report into brand involvement during this summer’s music festival season.

‘Field Work 2011 – the definitive guide to brand activations at music festivals’ will offer insight into the very best brand activity across the length and breadth of the UK’s festival scene. Packed full of case studies, insight and interviews with leading brands and festival promoters, it’s essential reading for anyone eager to better understand this passionate marketing opportunity.

While our upcoming report is focused on the UK this year, we haven’t taken our eye of the wider festival stage, and a number of innovative international campaigns have caught our attention this year.

The Echo Temple is a unique piece of on site activity that was developed by mobile manufacturer Kyocera in the US recently. The activation, which targeted the 50,000 music fans at VirginMobile Freefest in Maryland, saw festival goers interacting with six monolithic speaker towers fitted with motion tracking cameras, shaping and controlling their musical environment through the movement of their bodies.

It’s probably deeply technical behind-the-scenes, but the result is easily accessible and provides an all-inclusive activation that turns what could have been a very dull product sampling initiative into a high energy, interactive and emotive experience. Rather than pushing its product the brand drew a large crowd, turning its promotion into a massive party deep in the forest, enabling people to become the band – rather than just passively watching one.