Branded content is an emerging category in Australia. Being a smaller market with relatively cheaper media, broadcast product sponsorship & placement is more accessible. This is good and bad. If the media is cheaper, it can be undervalued, leading to under-investment in the creative integration, correspondingly creating a somewhat average consumer experience.

We wanted to step above this mêlée and create something consumers would enjoy and find genuinely useful. Whilst budget constraints ruled out broadcast content, digital media was both on budget, and gave us a better opportunity for content integration and better control of the consumer experience. In Australia there are no preclusions to branded content or product integration.

Challenge: Operating in the crowded sports drink category, Mizone Australia needed a way to stand out from the competition to drive sales. This needed to be achieved in the context of a 71% reduction in media budget from the previous year.Objective: Persuade regular Australian athletes to buy more Mizone.Strategy:Music, it is said, has the power to take us to a different state of consciousness – a place where physical effort feels easier, you perform better and feel less pain; a place they call 'The Zone'. Mizone set out to prove this theory, to identify what musical properties help you get there and therefore create 'Music to put you in the Zone'.Once we had composed and produced the music, it was distributed as a gift-with-purchase, thereby driving sales.Execution: We established the Mizone ZoneLab, the place where we conducted experiments to identify the best music to put regular athletes in the ‘zone’. We consulted Professor Peter Terry, a leading authority on music and sports performance psychology. Based on his research into beats-per-minute, rhythm, motivational lyrics and musical association, we briefed 4 composers and 4 everyday athletes.Each composer was tasked to create a track for 1 of the athletes, designed specifically to put them in the ‘zone’, taking into consideration their sport and regular routine.

The output of the experiments was 4 ZoneLab tested music tracks that we distributed via Mizone bottles as gifts-with-purchase. Film content documenting the experiments told the ZoneLab story, forming the basis of our content strategy and populating our advertising.

1.The music content that we created was made available as a gift with purchase, every bottle of Mizone became an advert for our content.2.We used the film content documenting our experiments to populate our advertising placements, driving people back to the Mizone ZoneLab Facebook page where they could view the experiments and download the music.3.Teaser content was seeded in relevant social media destinations.4.The story of our ZoneLab experiments fuelled our PR strategy, in turn driving traffic to the website housing the content.

Client Success: Our task was to persuade Australians to drink more Mizone. With 71% less media budget, Mizone achieved a year on year sales increase of 35%, scoring the highest monthly sales figure in 3 years.Consumer Success: The ZoneLab created music that was scientifically proven to be more motivating. Our consumers agreed. Over 35,000 people visited the ZoneLab, spending a total of 74,083 minutes watching the films or sampling the ZoneLab music. Our Facebook following increased from 700 to over 10,500 (with no 'like' gate) and the Australian press loved the story – our PR activity generated 6,012,105 media impressions.