Epidemic Sound, a soundtracking platform for brands, creatives, and content creators, had a strong product offering but had never properly invested in building a holistic brand or cut-through advertising. Their awareness had historically been built by performance and creator marketing without any brand-first strategic guidance.

As a result, our objectives were to establish an authentic, meaningful, long-term, and unforgettable brand platform that:

Re-established our authority as a category leader with a unique and differentiated voice,

Fostered deep connections with our audience in an overly functional category, and

Change misconceptions of stock music from ignorable background noise to something that can be the focal point of artistic expression and storytelling

Every creator has a vision for what they want their audience to feel. But emotions are notoriously complex and difficult to convey; luckily, nothing expresses emotion better than music.

When words fall short, Epidemic Sound’s frictionless experience makes it possible to find the perfect sound for whatever you feel without ever slowing you down, and tell stories that bring any emotion - no matter how complex - to life.

Introducing their new brand platform: Feel It, Find It - all about music’s ability to communicate feelings that are otherwise difficult to express.

The big creative idea for our launch campaign, “A Sound for Every Feeling”, was to do exactly that. We tapped into the breadth of our catalog to score the spectrum of human emotions in the most epic way: 502 music tracks, scoring 502 emotions, brought to life across 502 hyper-contextual global placements most conducive to each individual emotion.

Our audience was Career Focused Creators - from in-house at global brands, to professional creatives who needed to soundtrack their creativity.

Obstacles stood in their way. We uncovered the insight that creative energy is a precious resource - if it’s not properly protected, it’s all too easy for it to be depleted instead of harnessed. When the creative process is rife with energy black holes - like needing to search endlessly for the perfect sound - creators are taken out of the critically important creative flow.

We saw the opportunity to show how Epidemic empathizes with the complexity and fragility of the creative process, and can protect, improve, and inspire the process as well. With their innovative AI tools and music library uniquely organized by emotions, our strategy became to demonstrate how the frictionlessness of our platform eliminates energy black holes, keeps creators in the flow, and unleashes creative magic.

First, we identified 502 relatable emotions that we knew people were already feeling and thinking, and were much more specific than just joy or frustration. While some were universal, some were contextual to the different global markets in which we rolled out the work (like in Los Angeles, “the feeling of embracing a city where dreams come true…depending on who your parents are”). Then, over 6 weeks, we paired each feeling with 502 of the perfect locations, and perfect tracks, from Epidemic Sound; linked by a QR code, the ads were turned into a contextual audio experience.

In New York, Los Angeles, and London, the campaign ran in the full spectrum of OOH: from billboards to transit, wildpostings, and even guerilla placements like on NYC garbage bags. And after going worldwide, we scored the World Wide Web with contextual social and digital placements where we knew our audience would be.

The impact pipeline from Outdoor to digital has been outstanding. From 1,250,000 total interactions (scans and clicks), we’ve seen 123 million outdoor impressions. 500 million TikTok videos are using our music per day, equivalent to nearly 200 billion a year. YouTube videos with Epidemic tracks are seeing 2 billion views daily. And furthermore, 70% the top 200 YouTube channels now use our music to soundtrack their content.

Under Epidemic’s new brand platform, every channel has gone over benchmark resulting in an 8% lift in brand consideration in key markets New York, LA, and London. We have the highest unaided awareness for Search, growing from 26% to 30%.

The soundtracking category used to be a creative no-man’s land, lacking artistic legitimacy and depth. But through endless placements, we brought endless feelings to life—endless reminders that Epidemic Sound has the perfect soundtrack for every single one.