With the growth of digital platforms and proliferation of media, marketers are increasingly challenged to reach and engage with relevant consumers. There has been a notable shift in how Americans consume media: audiences are moving towards mobile. According to a recent study from Flurry data, Americans spend 2 hours and 57 minutes a day on average on mobile devices, compared to 2 hours and 38 minutes watching television. In addition, Nielsen reports that 84% of consumers use mobile devices as a second, supplementary screen to television, suggesting an increase in media multitasking behaviors.

With more opportunities to consume content across media platforms, audiences are exposed to even more advertising messages, making it critical for advertisers to reach audiences in contextually relevant environments in compelling and impactful ways. Now more than ever people have more entertainment options across every screen, which means that branded entertainment is held to higher standards: the content must be as compelling, unique and personal to consumer preferences in order to capture people’s attention and drive resonance.

Our premium advertising solutions across video, audio, and display encouraged listeners to add the Next Stage custom content station. StubHub’s high-impact media executions on our platform included mobile interstitial takeovers as well as Promoted Stations, which are native advertising solutions that recommend specific brand stations to StubHub’s targeted audience. These contextually relevant efforts drove station awareness and encouraged audiences to spend quality time engaging with the unique, custom branded content. Additionally, StubHub geo-targeted customers via email and social marketing to drive further station traffic.

Significant social media activity on StubHub and the agency's social media channels extended the reach of the StubHub Next Stage program. Station listeners and concert attendees used the branded hashtags #NextStage, helping to drive awareness and engagement beyond the Pandora music listening platform and live venue performances.

More than one million listeners added the StubHub custom content station, delivering a highly engaged audience that is 3X larger than StubHub’s Twitter and Facebook social media audiences combined. And listeners continue to spend quality time on the StubHub NextStage brand station, with over 417,000 total listening hours recorded through November 2014, which equates to an astounding 47 years spent with the StubHub brand. Each listener averaged over 14 minutes of time spent engaged with the brand station. And the majority of campaign awareness was driven by mobile activity: 95% of station adds were derived from smartphones.

Listeners filled each concert to capacity due to effective promotional event media, exceeding overall event attendance goals by 54%. The concert from the artist Love & Theft ultimately reached a highly engaged audience of over 400,000 people on social media channels. Furthermore, custom brand content drove ongoing engagement with the station: the artist Tokyo Police Club’s post-show sizzle reel reached an additional 2 million fans and resulted in 5,490 station adds the day it was released.

The StubHub Next Stage campaign successfully illustrates the power of a brand tapping into the passion point of new music discovery to introduce memorable content marketing. StubHub partnered with the agency to target and reach a scalable and highly engaged audience with custom branded entertainment content that creatively connected trending artists with StubHub consumers.