HP faced a perception challenge: they needed to reinvigorate their brand for the millennial generation.

We saw that for this generation, collaboration and co-creation rule. It’s about taking something, putting your spin on it, and making it better.

We decided to focus on a key passion point, music, and give the Next Generation an unprecedented way to participate in the creative process. We hijacked the YouTube comments section, and transformed it from a place that tears things down to a community where the Next Generation collaborated to build something up.

With 2Days Beat, producer Clams Casino and MC Vic Mensa used HP technology to create a track and music video live on YouTube. And we invited the whole world to help them write it. Over two days, viewers affected the creative process, art for the set, and visuals for the music video, simply by leaving a comment.

Four days before the event, we seeded the campaign with leading media outlets, released a teaser on YouTube, and began running a :30 of the teaser on key millennial-centric channels like MTV and Comedy Central.

On Day 1 of the event, a YouTube masthead and pre-roll buy pushed people to the experience, and our teaser ran during primetime on NBC and ABC, generating mass awareness of the program.

At the hub, we enlisted a team of live social ‘hosts’, encouraging engagement and driving the narrative forward.

Facebook and Twitter amplified key moments of the experience, leveraging paid celebrity influencers to expand our audience.

Finally, through integrated rich media both on and off the hub, we drove consumers to retail, incentivizing them with coupons. In brick and mortar stores, like Best Buy, we supplemented the campaign with an augmented reality product demonstration, with key talent showing off our hero product’s features.

In the end, 2Days Beat not only put HP back into the conversation with millennials, it put them at the center of it – with an experience no one had seen before:

Engagement:

Over two days, there were over 214,000 visits to the hub and more than 10,000 comments. By way of comparison, “Spencer’s Home Depot Marriage Proposal,” Mashable’s #8 viral video of 2013, has only 9,300 comments.

Views on HP's YouTube channel increased 1057% (from 0.7% to 8.1% of total audience) among the 18-24 crowd.

The average viewing time of the live stream was 12 minutes.

Brand/Retail:

Traffic to HP.com increased 358% vs. weeks prior.

Not only was there a 7% increase among 18-34s in brand awareness vs. the preceding quarter, we saw an 11% increase among 18-34s in perception that HP makes innovative products and a 14% increase in consideration vs. the previous holiday season.

HP hit 104% of their holiday sales goal with the device featured in the campaign.

Earned Media:

We saw an unexpectedly strong response from the music community following the release of “Egyptian Cotton,” with over 150 blogs covering the music video and its creation, leading to approximately 60 million earned impressions.