This year the winners of Studio Brussel’s contest were awarded with an audience bigger than ever before through the pre-roll concerts. With targeted pre-rolls, we made the winners the digital opening act for some of the world’s biggest stars like Coldplay, Drake and Daft Punk.

When searching for one of these stars, you wouldn’t get just any other commercial as a pre-roll, you would discover our contest winners as the opening act for the music you were looking for. This way we linked the young talent on YouTube to similar artists, increasing the chance of finding an interested fan base, and elevating their success.

As a radio station, annoying music lovers is the last thing on our mind. That’s why we chose skippable pre-rolls over un-skippable ones. Not only does this mitigate any irritation, it also allowed us to measure the interest of our audience without focusing click-throughs: if they didn’t skip the opening act after 5 seconds, we knew they showed genuine interest in the new artists. Our pre-roll concerts aired during 13 days.

• The opening acts could be skipped after 5 seconds but 40% watched the complete performance.

• It gave them a fan base of over 525.000 people.

• Winners will be the opening acts on Pukkelpop, one of Belgium’s Biggest festivals.

•One participant even sold out his own solo show twice, became the number 1 in the Belgian charts and will play on Rock Werchter as well.