How do you get the world’s most jaded audience (New Yorkers) to care about an out-of-home advertising experience? You play on one of their deepest desires: voyeurism. Every New Yorker is curious about what their neighbors are up to. We decided to fuse this cultural truth with Coors Light’s existing equity in music, and launch the world’s first OOH platform to show – on a block-by-block basis – what New Yorkers’ favorite tunes are. Partnering with the LinkNYC, we turned old phone booths into music discovery platforms, showcasing hyper-local mixtapes. Every 15 minutes, these digital displays would refresh to show pedestrians the top songs culled from real-time Shazam data in their neighborhood, be it Union Square, Turtle Bay or Murray Hill. To sweeten the pot, passersby could do more than simply gawk at their neighborhood’s most popular playlists -- they could download their own copy of the playlist.

To execute on the strategy, Shazam partnered with LinkNYC to create the world’s first hyper-local, out-of-home jukeboxes. Working with the agency and LinkNYC’s founding company, Intersection, we secured a partnership to be one of the first advertisers on the LinkNYC platform. To realize the dynamic potential of these ads, we architected a program using our music discovery platform, pulling in real time the music that New Yorkers were listening to on a block-by-block basis. We built software that could ingest our tag stream and generate neighborhood playlists on the LinkNYC terminals, refreshed every 15 minutes and employed Bluetooth beacon technology to create unique engagement points. Anyone with Shazam on their phone could walk up to a LinkNYC terminal and instantly download that playlist.

The results exceeded expectations all around. First and foremost, New Yorkers loved it, and so did the press: we garnered 879 clips and 2.4 billion news impressions, but more importantly, we also received 18 million impressions on the streets of New York City. And 70,000 unique playlists were created across 7 neighborhoods.