Rolling Stone has been migrating from a magazine to a content hub recently, growing their audience within social media with its trademark young and musical content. As the process steadily moves forward, the brand is always looking for opportunities to produce ideas that can drive engagement and grow the follower base, with Instagram as a focal point. So, our brief was to create a promo that could do just that in a short period of time, with the set objective of at least a 30% increase in engagement over one week.

Mastering the guitar takes practice. But besides riffs and exercises, there is something more gruesome new guitar players must go through: “keep it quiet, god damn it!”. Parents and neighbors hate the process of learning. At the same time, the more you learn the guitar, the more you idolize legendary guitar players, and more often than not, you hang their posters on your bedroom.

So, we thought: what if Rolling Stone created acoustic foam posters that isolate sound, so guitar players can practice in peace? And then, gave them out on a “best riff wins” Instagram promo? We created the Soundproof Posters: 4 designs, inspired by legendary guitars and players, totally crafted out of studio grade foam. The more posters you hang, the quieter you can practice. The posters were divided in sets and awarded to the followers with the coolest riffs.

We noticed a common behavior on Instagram: people love to post themselves playing guitar. Our strategy was to take advantage of that, creating a “best riff wins” competition within the platform to award our Soundproof Posters.

This worked very well to attract new followers, as people tag their friends as the promo grew and grew. And also, it drove engagement, because our base is in the vast majority composed of music lovers that would press play on a riff in their timeline. One thing fed the other, and quickly, our Soundproof Posters promo gained traction.

Also, we knew we needed a new thing, a new idea, never done before, because this aligns with our current brand mission of reinvention. The Soundproof Posters are just that: a fresh take on the old behavior of rock n roll poster hanging, with a touch of craft and production.

The process of the Soundproof Posters idea took three months overall, from conception to end-product. The first two weeks were spent on research. Our team went on a trial and error basis, as new production techniques were needed to manipulate liquid acoustic foam in a way that allowed design quality without loss of soundproofing properties. Then, when we found a way to do it, the process to make all 4 designs perfectly took two months. The last two weeks were spent preparing the promo and the consumer face of our campaign. The whole project had a budget of around 10k dollars.

RESULTS IN ONE WEEK:

- 62% increase in engagement

- 10% growth in follower base