BlackBerry enlists The Wanted to help reach young users

BlackBerry has launched a major online campaign with music stars as part of its strategy to promote its products to a younger audience.

The Live & Lost campaign sees artists, including UK hip-hop stars Professor Green and Example and band The Wanted, attempting to get from a secluded area of England to a gig in another part of the country in less than five days, armed with just £20 and their BlackBerry with which to ask for help from fans.

The artists will utilise social media channels to contact fans, who can help either by offering food, shelter or transport in return for private gigs at their houses or schools.

The content from the campaign and information will be aggregated on the BlackBerry UK Facebook page, pulling in information from the BlackBerry and artists’ pages on BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), Flickr, Foursquare, Twitter and YouTube.

The campaign aligns with BlackBerry’s continued focus on a younger demographic. Its customer base is increasingly turning from being business led to consumer led. new media age understands that almost 80% of its customers are now non-business users.

It’s also seeing a huge adoption of BlackBerry in the youth segment thanks in part to the explosion of its BBM instant messaging service.

Gavin Byrne, an analyst at Informa, said, “BlackBerry’s strategy has been to focus more on the consumer, which it has needed to in order to increase its reach.”

Last year, BlackBerry launched a smaller-scale version of the campaign using the artist Frankmusik and his MySpace page. Due to the success of that, the mobile brand decided to widen the campaign to three artists and more sites to extend its reach and appeal.

The three artists are all promoting the campaign with teaser content. Example will be the first to be dropped into a remote area in Snowdonia this week.

This story first appeared on newmediaage.co.uk

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