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.

The best media submissions typically do one of two things: 1) use old media in radically new ways; or 2) are first to market with an exciting new media technology. In the case of Shazam, Coors Light, LinkNYC, we did both, transforming old-school New York City phone booths into a dynamic platform for music discovery.

As the home of roughly 2,000 bar owners, more than 8 million residents and countless more tourists, New York City is a critical market for Coors Light. But reaching this media-saturated audience is easier said than done. The agency & Shazam developed a strategy that would engage these audiences in several ways. At the core is a new, hard-to-miss media platform in the vicinity of key venues. We needed to create a contextual experience that tapped into New Yorkers’ innate sense of voyeurism and FOMO (fear of missing out). Finally, we leveraged existing media behaviors – in this case, the popularity of mobile music tagging – to create an authentic experience.

New York City is home to close to 2,000 bars. These venues, and the customers who frequent them, are extremely important to MillerCoors. But reaching New Yorkers – a skeptical audience that’s oversaturated with media – is a challenging proposition. Together with the agency and Coors Light, we developed an OOH music driven ad platform, that not only reached these customers but also engaged and entertained them. We partnered with LinkNYC, a radical project underwritten by Google’s Sidewalk Labs, that is replacing all of New York City’s 7,500 phone booths with sensor-rich terminals and free gigabit Wi-Fi to convert these phone booths to music discovery platforms, showcasing hyper-local mixtapes. Anyone with the Shazam app on their phone could walk up to a LinkNYC terminal, click their app and instantly download that playlist to their mobile devices.