#but the fact that the maker has created and integrated saw inspired tasks into a pinball game

[catzy88]

@disdaidal and @morewyckedthanyou Now you know what to get me for my next birthday~ 😘 Well, it'd at least go really well with the Halloween party theme. 😈😂

wanted to share this HOMEMADE saw pinball machine that debuted at the texas pinball festival this weekend! the gameplay involves initiating games and completing difficult timed tasks, like hitting drop targets within a minute to survive. the reverse beartrap on top even moves and snaps when you lose! article with a video showing details here

[theinvinciblenoob]

UnitedMasters came out of stealth about a year ago with a plan to help artists have a more direct relationship with their customers and fans and, more importantly, retain more control over their actual recordings. With $70MM from Alphabet, A16z, Floodgate and 20th Century Fox — as well as founder Steve Stoute, the former President of Interscope Records, the promises are big but the team seems up to the task.

Now, they’re ready to announce their first big partnership: The NBA.

With this launch, UnitedMasters artists will be able to have their music played across all of their properties around the world including digital properties like NBA.com and its apps.

“We’ve seen that there are a lot of synergies between the music industry, sports leagues, and individual personalities across athletes and musicians,” says Steve Stoute, founder and CEO of UnitedMasters . “The overlap between UnitedMasters artists, their fans and the NBA’s following provides a mutually beneficial opportunity to tap into an artist pool that is also a target consumer for the NBA.”

The NBA’s social community is huge, and the audience has an outsized tendency to be engaged with the music, style and culture that surrounds its fans and superstar players.

“The real value is the artist and who they are – they’re NBA fans, they’re fans of the product they’re soundtracking. You can go from watching the game to soundtracking its highlights,” says Stoute. “This is truly democratizing and removes any barrier from getting your music heard. You can watch something through the NBA, be inspired, create music and then upload it to UnitedMasters for the chance to be heard by 1.5 billion people.”

UnitedMasters founder Steve Stoute

The UnitedMasters hook is that it’s a record label that makes money on royalties and distribution, while allowing artists to retain the rights to their master product. Stoute was motivated by the fact that the creators and culture makers that have been driving the conversation, preferences and consumption habits of their fans have been unable to have a direct relationship with those most highly engaged consumers. Instead, they’re disintermediated by licensing and endorsement deals, middle men that control how their product can be used and by whom, and restrictive deals.

Outside of amazing, but rare, successes like famously independent Chance the Rapper, or online sensations that build up their own merch and marketing arms, it’s difficult for most artists to see a pathway from screening their own tees in their basement to partnering with big brands without having to make all of the same concessions along the way that have been in place for years.

Simply put, the people most responsible for shaping what people feel, how they dress, how they dance and yes, what they buy, have been largely unable to craft a direct person-to-person relationship with those people.

“We have a longstanding relationship with Steve Stoute and saw a unique opportunity with UnitedMasters to enhance the experience for NBA fans on our social and digital media, while providing a global digital stage for up-and-coming artists. This partnership will create a direct line between new artists and the NBA,” said Jeff Marsilio, SVP New Media at the NBA about what they get out of the deal.

“The breakthrough in this structure is that it’s a unique example of a brand or league providing a global distribution platform for artists — something UnitedMasters and the NBA are singularly positioned to do. The artists will have the opportunity to have their music heard on a global digital stage, while our fans will now have a new way to discover music while they enjoy NBA highlights on our social and digital media. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.”

The NBA partnership will allow artists to have their music heard by a much bigger audience, but it will also allow for UnitedMasters to use its creative agency Translation to market themselves, their merchandise and tickets to their shows directly.

And, perhaps most valuably, the artists also get data about all of these endpoints. Analytics, taken for granted by indie creators across platforms like YouTube, Soundcloud and more, are often either invisible or very strictly guarded and doled out once an artist makes a deal with a label, who treats those insights as proprietary. Access to data and help to understand what that data means and how to leverage it to connect customers, companies and money making opportunities to artists is a key premise of Translation and UnitedMasters.

“Starting on November 8, artists can sign up on UnitedMasters to create a profile, upload music and videos to the platform for distribution to major DSPs (e.g. Spotify, Apple), and opt-in for consideration to be featured in NBA content. In the future, artists will opt into other brand partnerships separately,” says Stoute.

The partnership is the first big test of the UnitedMasters premise. The firm will analyze the data coming from artists and fans to help figure out which tracks are best to insert into the stream of content going to the NBA. It will also measure how being featured on NBA properties reflects in artist performance like pure traffic to the artist’s music and other media, as well as providing analysis of the before and after effects on a larger scale. Basically, using data to tell exactly how beneficial the integration is for individual artists, and trying to maximize the match between artists and their most engaged fans.

“These data-driven insights and performance analysis will help UnitedMasters and artists understand what other partnerships could be a good fit for them to opt-in for in the future so they can build momentum with audiences where they have demonstrated success, continue to reach new fans and gain exposure in new markets,” says Stoute.

Kanye comes for a visit on launch week

If every artist is able to get a deeper, more personal understanding of what exact audiences most love their music, follow what they do and buy into what they’re selling, they can maximize their profits without having to sell the farm to get a small slice of that bigger pie.

If the proposition of simply being able to understand their audiences via data sounds somewhat basic, it’s probably because we’ve all been spoiled by how central data is to many platforms for music, social media and videos. Imagine if you could publish on YouTube but only see pure views, never where those views came from in the world, what the customers who love you are interested in or who they are at all. It handicaps your ability to market anything to those people or to build a relationship with them by understanding what they like, what regional or demographic trends you should be capitalizing on to make sure you’re maximizing your profit.

From the start, the transition to streaming and digital distribution for music has been handicapped by the efforts of the traditional machinery to maintain its grip on the path from artists to fans. There have been some attempts to loosen that grip over the years, and some that are confusingly un-seized, like the potential for Apple Music to be a true platform for artists that want a relatively direct commercial relationship with their fans.

UnitedMasters has some definite potential, and it’s about time someone tried something new here. The NBA partnership is a very savvy start to building up a surface area for its artists to market directly, we’ll see what they do next.

via TechCrunch

[digitalmonsterorg]

Best Viral Social Media Marketing Campaigns of 2017 to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing

Every marketer wants his marketing campaign to go viral. With social media marketing, there is a possibility to deliver a viral campaign without bringing out the war chest. A viral social media marketing campaign can help you achieve results better than the entire year’s marketing effort. However, designing a viral SMM campaign is no easy task. It requires a carefully crafted strategy, attention to detail, understanding of social media audience, impeccable execution, and an 'outside the box' idea. While the requirements may appear overwhelming, every year, hundreds of marketers achieve this feat. At the core of these viral campaigns are some very innovative ideas. After scouring the web and reviewing hundreds of social media marketing campaign, we have compiled the list of 5 best viral campaigns that will get your creative juices flowing and help you can think outside the box. Jollibee

Jollibee is a Filipino fast-food giant and it is very likely that you have already seen their viral videos. The company managed to create not one, but two viral campaigns in 2017. The fast-food company chose to associate itself with the Filipino lifestyle by highlighting the victories, challenges, and unique love stories of the local people. The company managed seamless brand integration in the video series it launched during the valentine in 2017. The videos were inspired by true love stories and invoked emotions in the viewers. Both the videos generated a lot of buzz on social media with over five million views. It also got coverage from mainstream media like the CNN. The key takeaway from this campaign is that it pays to remain true to the media that is being created. The makers focussed on reliability and authenticity without focussing on the results. It played on the nostalgia and past experience of the viewers which resulted in a phenomenal success for the campaign. We Are Here – Airbnb

Airbnb has been an innovator in hospitality domain, but its marketing campaigns every year are nothing short of brilliance. Airbnb gave a whole new meaning to the term ‘experiential marketing’ with its ‘We Are Here campaign.’ This campaign was to celebrate the launch of new Trips platform that allowed travellers to explore local experiences with local people. As a part of this social media marketing campaign, six unique films from six different cities were created live on Facebook making the viewer feel that they were exploring along with the videographer. This brilliant marketing strategy saw six million people participate in the span of 24 hours alone. People from around the world engaged with this live video on Facebook. The key takeaway from this campaign is that ‘inferred participation’ was introduced as a new method of engagement. Instead of asking for the video to be shared, Airbnb successfully got organic participation. The campaign was also the recipient of several notable awards in 2017. Airbnb also launched a successful Instagram campaign called #WeAccept in the same year. Gucci

  It is no secret that memes and animated GIFs are loved on social media, especially by the millennials. They easily receive far more shares and likes than other forms of media. Gucci used this trend on the internet to their advantage. Gucci launched the latest collection of its watches called Le Marche des Merveilles followed by the Instagram campaign. Gucci started a campaign called ‘That Feeling When Gucci’ or #TFWGucci to depict how it felt to wear luxury fashion watches. Acclaimed internet artist such as William Ndatila, Alec Soth, and photography team of Mitra Saboury & Derek Paul Jack Boyle was commissioned to create memes. The memes were the reflection of the brand by being direct and blunt.

  The key takeaway from this campaign is that it was created to make use of the latest trends of social media without losing the core value of the brand. The campaign made fun of the status of wearing Gucci while reinforcing the prestige of the same. It revealed that being true to your audience can pay off quite well. DeleteUber The Delete Uber campaign was as the name suggests, not a marketing campaign by the company but an organic campaign. We felt there was a need to include this in the list for a reason other than being an effective social media campaign. This organic Twitter campaign reveals the fact that companies need to watch their steps in the current sage of social media as one wrong move can highly damage its reputation. The DeleteUber trend started due to the taxi aggregator’s response to the strike by NY taxi workers. The NYC taxi strike was organised in response to the ‘Muslim ban’ announced by the US president Donald Trump. Following the tweet by NY taxi workers announcing a strike, Uber tweeted that the surge pricing in the strike region was turned off. The reaction to this was swift and #DeleteUber began trending on Twitter within no time. People began not just uninstalling the app, but cancelling their Uber accounts too. The key takeaway from this campaign is that at times perception can have a greater impact than the actual intent. In this case, it is possible that Uber had their heart in the right place, but ended up complicating the matter on social media.

Notably, not just Uber, but several companies have made this error resulting in such negative trends on social media. Uber has been a regular offender with #BoycottUber #F**KUber and #UberCrimes being some major negative trends against the company. Heineken – Worlds Apart Today, we live in a polarised world where people have a wide range of beliefs. Heineken used the trend of conducting ‘social experiments’ to show an alternative. In its campaign ‘Worlds Apart’, Heineken brought together people of opposing views to undertake a simple task together. Heineken wanted to prove that even people with most opposing views can find a common ground to discuss. Two strangers were asked to put together furniture and then views of both the participant on a particular subject were revealed. Each of them was then given an option to walk away or discuss their views over a beer. This was refreshing from the heated discussions we see on the TV or the internet. The campaign was widely successful with over 14 million views. The key takeaway from this campaign is that it pays to break the barriers and the set rules. While everyone thought raging debates were the only form of discussion, Heineken showed what it meant to engage and discuss with another human being. To create a viral social media marketing campaign, marketers should think about creating content that leaves a lasting impression and keeps people talking for a while. Social media is a dynamic and what works today may not work tomorrow. No one can predict what will turn viral, the only thing that remains constant is creating engaging and unique content. Read the full article