Beats by Dre & PMG
Creative Strategy | Branded Content | Social Media Campaign Strategy | UGC Campaigns | Influencer Marketing | Interactive Digital Activation | Display Creative | Landing Page Strategy & Design | Digital Production
Beats by Dre is known for shaping culture through music, sport, and storytelling, and my work with PMG spanned multiple campaigns that reinforced that legacy. From high-impact digital activations to global landing page production, I helped ensure creative execution was seamless across social, display, and web. A major highlight was the #StraightOutta Somewhere campaign, which became a viral cultural movement and earned 7 Cannes Lions awards.
With the highly anticipated release of Straight Outta Compton, the biopic featuring the origin story of NWA and Beats by Dre's co-founder, the brand sought to launch a digital campaign to promote the film, create affinity through social engagement, and extend the reach of the campaign's videos.
PMG's objective was to go beyond the core hip hop community and engage a broad range of fans and consumers globally.
My Role: Creative Strategy, Graphic Design, Client Services
Agencies Involved: PMG Advertising Agency, R/GA
We sought to leverage the broad cultural momentum of the film with a simple idea: create a customizable meme that allowed people to "rep their own city". Users would show the world their own origin story by uploading their photo and filling in the blank after "Straight Outta ____." Consumers participated via the campaign's microsite across desktop and mobile devices, and Beats' family of celebrity endorsers were mobilized to extend messaging to their fans.
PMG built a media and creative program that leveraged mobile and social media engagement. We created a unique iAd unit that allowed users to create memes directly in-ad and share to their social networks.
We then amplified the talent content and curated "Best of" consumer content through the brand's social channels.
Our influencer activation led to organic amplification of the #StraightOutta meme. To ensure the campaign maintained support across all channels during the flight, we also launched an extensive SEM campaign to capture search query traffic related to the movie and the meme.
#StraightOutta catapulted from a simple meme generator to a viral social trend seeping into the fabric of culture. With memes generated from hip-hop and sports fans to celebrities, brands, and even the White House, users jumped on the opportunity to make a statement.
With the viral nature of the meme gaining momentum, #StraightOutta became the number one trending item simultaneously on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter — something never achieved before. At the campaign’s peak, there were an average of 15,000 #StraightOutta tweets and retweets per minute.
The press made sure to follow suit. The campaign was covered in over 100 major news publications and blogs (including CNN, Washington Post, MTV News, Fortune, Forbes, Business Insider, BuzzFeed and a lot more) as a clever marketing effort that not only pushed the film into mainstream culture, but also "took over the Internet." The earned media had a reach of more than 1.2 billion people worldwide.
© PMG Advertising Agency - Work done while at PMG