To introduce its new subscription music service, Yahoo! opted to think small. In a new integrated campaign from agency Soho Square, New York, and OgilvyOne, San Francisco, Mini Pops–pixilated creatures created by artist Craig Robinson–come to life to tout Yahoo! Music Unlimited. The new digital music service offers over a million songs, and costs subscribers just $5 a month. The package for Yahoo! Unlimited features TV spots, radio, online elements, wild postings, and outdoor. The TV ads, which include the spots “Green Day,” “UFO,” and “Missy Elliott,” feature tiny, pixilated versions of musical artists that were animated by the team of Smith & Foulkes–Allan and Adam, respectively–of Nexus Productions, London. (The pair was behind this year’s award-winning Honda “Grrr” spot out of Wieden + Kennedy, London.) Each spot uses humor and the images of teeny, tiny pop stars to get across the point about the music service.
For instance in Green Day, the band performs its hit song “Holiday”–they get so carried away with their head-banging moves, that they literally lose their heads. In “Missy Elliott,” the hip-hop diva’s dancers are replaced by ninja-like warriors, who eventually kidnap the performer. Each spot ends with the supered tagline: “Over a million songs. Five bucks a month. This is huge.” The TV work broke during last month’s telecast of the MTV Video Music Awards.
The online and banner ads for the music service are peppered throughout the Yahoo! site, and let users see and listen to the music of the Mini Pops. One online execution allows users to interact with a mini Missy Elliott, who gives dance lessons in a sequence called “Bounce With Missy.” Another online component called “Trick Daddy’s Frequilizer” asks users if they are “Ready To Get Your Freak On”; consumers can then choose their favorite tunes from a particular genre while Mini-Pops groove to the beat, and sing along. Other upcoming elements included WiFi hot spots, whereby “Mini Pops” will text message users’ mobile phones, and posters that will have phone numbers people can text message, allowing them to download a Mini Pop to their cell phones.
“We wanted to find something very iconic and own-able–that would be own-able on any platform we might think of,” relates Arthur Ceria, creative director at OgilvyOne. “That’s the strength of what the campaign is about.” Ceria noted that a fun factor also needed to be a part of the concept. The Mini Pop package, relates Ceria, is also “very viral. We wanted to find something [that was more than] a TV spot or a radio spot, or an interactive–more an integrated idea.”
The team from Soho Square–led by group creative directors Andy Berndt and Jeff Curry–and the team from OgilvyOne, which was headed up by Ceria and creative director Aaron Griffiths, began meeting in January, and quickly hammered out the Mini Pop approach to the integrated package All the creatives involved noted that it was important to have a solid idea in place prior to doing any work, particularly since the concept would be seeded into so many different spaces. “With Yahoo!, the medium is the message,” relates Curry. “Basically, everything happens on the Web, so you don’t present TV scripts–you present it as a broadcast piece. The lines are getting really blurred between what’s television, what’s viral, what’s print and what’s banner, what’s interactive, off line and on line.”
Griffiths relates that because the Mini Pops “aren’t ads, they work everywhere. These little creatures essentially live in their own world, which means they can live in any world–TV, posters, etc. … We worked very closely with teams in New York and San Francisco, and also with the artist in terms of creating the world that they live in.”
The idea to use “Mini Pops” came about via the “this is huge” portion of the tagline for the music service. “It was funny that they were really tiny,” says Berndt. “We put them together with ‘This is huge.’ One of the things we really wanted to do was get a digital taste, because obviously Yahoo! is primarily a digital brand, and what we all liked about it was that these little musicians can crawl all over the site–they would live in the exact same way online as they would in print, and TV and everywhere else.” The idea to use the work of Robinson, a Berlin-based artist, came about when the creative at Soho Square, a branding agency that is a part of the WPP Group family of agencies, saw his book called Minipops, which feature musicians and other pop culture icons in all their pixilated glory. Part of the fun of the book and the Web site, as well as the Yahoo! work, is to figure out who each figure represents. The creatives approached Robinson, who after some initial hesitation, jumped on board, creating all the Mini Pops for the campaign. (The TV portion was animated at Nexus, while the team from OgilvyOne created the Flash animation on the Web site.)
The decision to use Smith & Foulkes as the directors on the project was a serendipitous one: Curry relates that Robinson, who had dabbled in ad work before, had previously worked with Nexus. At the time the directing duo began working on Mini Pops, “Grrr” was just beginning to be widely recognized and honored at awards shows–among other honors, it won this year’s Grand Prix in film at the Cannes International Advertising Festival. Berndt explains that the decisions about which artists would be featured came about based on relationships Yahoo! had with acts, what performers had new releases coming out, and who was topping the charts. Curry relates that the creatives would write scripts for a particular artist, then send it off for approval. The creatives report that the musicians are pleased with their Mini Pop counterparts: during a party Yahoo! hosted in Miami for the MTV Video Music Awards, Mini Pop pictures lined the walls, and the music acts attending were wandering around, looking for their likenesses. The team is going forward, and will unveil some new Mini Pop artists in the coming months. “Yahoo! gets 400 million unique visitors a month,” states Ceria. “It’s worth it for the artists to be pixilated.”
