All About Brands in Music | Processes, Challenges & Solutions

By Sanghamitra Mishra All About Music, a throwback to the "All About Brands in Music: Brand Equity: Opportunity Awaits!" panel at the conference. Music Marketing is a largely new market in India, where artists are seen to be endorsed, plugged into brand requirements and visa versa. The Music industry is one of the oldest industries in the world. This panel at All About Music indeed was very insightful. [caption id="attachment_1837" align="alignleft" width="300"] Harshad Chavan at All About Music[/caption] The session was moderated by Harshad Chavan from MD, Toast Events, he brought out some insightful conversations of the expert panelists representing this space. Harshad has been the man behind game-changing strategies of experiential marketing for luxury & lifestyle brands in India. in his 8 years of event/brand marketing career, he has launched 150 iconic, international brands in the country. Today his company is sought to be the one-stop solution provider for cool, innovative & out of the box ideas while creating best practices for the 250 brands he works with. The brands carry his ideas world over. The panelists included Gurpreet Singh, Co-Founder & COO, One Digital Entertainment, Kiran Dicruz,  Head of Brand Partnerships & Music Licensing, Sony Music India, Sahith Sethuraman, Brand Manager, Bacardi Limited Trademark India & South-East Asia, and Vinit Karnik, Business Head - Entertainment, Sports & Live Events, GroupM. The session dived into topics addressing the whys, whats, and hows of the brands in music. We are hopeful we'd be able to take you through all the queries you have in mind when it comes to "All About Brands In Music".

Live Entertainment As An Ecosystem for Brands

Using concerts as an ecosystem, we have noted a huge development and an influx from the advertising community. What is necessary to note here is between the IPs and brands there is a lack of consistency or a long-term vision. The integrated logo unit of most concerts keeps changing year on year. It is only getting tougher to measure the return on investment when it comes to Live entertainment sponsored events.

Event Management Companies, here's a tip for you!

Prepare post-event reports, gathering data to enable brands to measure their investment and ensure it was a mutually benefitting partnership between the event IP & the brand and not just a mere charity or a transaction. This will lead to building retained relationships, shared long-term goals. While on the brand's side we have established the problem remains of the lack of consistency, and in the events and entertainment side, the major problem remains to be lack of data post the event. The Brands do not reinvest into certain IPs also because of after the completion of an event, they do not receive an outline of who attended the event, the key characteristics of the audiences, and a detailed or even a generic data on who these people are. This, if provided, would enable them to assess the investment and derive an output, or ROI.

The Sony Music Way of Engaging Brands! "Creating Music Fans Into Brand Fans"

Sony Entertainment takes a 360 artist development approach for an artist. Kiran Dicruz,  Head of Brand Partnerships & Music Licensing, Sony Music India, shared the process that the record label, management firm follow while approaching a brand. In the recent past, Sony has sold multiple deals for their artists, the recent one being Badshah. Where we have seen their involvement in creating the incredible Punjabi hip-hop/rap artist Badshah. Some of the latest brand engagement noted included one with Tuborg, then also Yamaha. Kiran took us through the process of how Sony approaches brands, The traditional way of approaching a client involved understanding the brand brief, trying to see what is the need gap and where you can plug that in.

Kiran Dicruz said, The way we do this is more strategic, understand why a client would want to be in music space, say from the content perspective, or strategically say they wish to "invest" into music so that they can grow their audiences essentially to create music fans into brand fans. First, we objectify, understand what the objective for the brand's investment is. Then understanding the brand's audiences then create a solution which is more strategic than creative. For us it's not about artists, it's about the strategy. Marry the artist into the strategy. We make our clients understand how via music they can reach out to their consumers.

The Essentials for Brands in Music

1. Making sure the artist is giving relevant content to the brand
2. Making sure the brand and the artist fall under the ROI metric system
3. Making sure the deal is beneficial to both the parties at the same time.
4. Making sure neither the brand nor the talent gets degraded at the end of the process.
5. Keeping up with the exclusive brands, sponsorship for festivals.

The question of the hour: How do the big bucks start flowing in?

“Understanding the core objective of the client, understanding the brand audiences and understanding how the audience is consuming the content given by the brands.” -Sahith

Decoding Why It Works Very Well For Bacardi Nh7 Weekender

When you do it once it's just a sponsorship, when you do it 7 years consecutively, you co-create it. That's what OML & Bacardi did! With time, Bacardi started gaining credibility for it. For years, at NH7 Weekender, Bacardi stage has been the biggest stage with all the headliners, rock acts, and highest footfall at all times.

With every year when we go back, we think about how to make it better the next year. How do we take the benchmark up, how do we give the artists exposure, how do we give the audiences great experiences, content, environment! That's what drives us, the pursuit of excellence every day. But, if you’re not in it for the long run then I would say there's no point getting into it said Sahith to the audiences.

Harshad to Sahith: How does one get into the lineup? What does it take for an artist to be on the NH7 Weekender platform?

Sahith answered All it takes for an artist is to make good music! While it's important that artist sells the tickets, so the more people in there, the better it is, but then we can balance it out. It's a function of what’s going to draw an audience but having to strike a balance between encouraging upcoming artists, if we don’t, we'd have same artists coming year after year, and the audiences are going to get fatigued and the will eventually stop looking forward to it.

How "One Digital" Does It? One Digital Entertainment has amassed over 2,500 content creators and partners with over 20 billion minutes of content watched on YouTube, making us India’s largest certified multi-channel network. Currently, home to some of the biggest names in the Indian media industry, the One Digital Entertainment family caters to content creators’ every single need, from planning and strategizing video content to production, syndication, and distribution of the same.  Like family, One Digital Entertainment takes care of our own by building up and supporting our creators through innovative collaborations and detailed attention to brand-building.  In a fragmented content viewership ecosystem, they have developed a constantly-evolving formula for peak organic viewership through a harmonious marriage of creativity and technology. One Digital Entertainment bestows brands an all-encompassing digital strategy that navigates through the hottest digital and social media platforms.

Gurpreet Singh "It’s a journey! it's not always about numbers, its the influence & impact you make”

Today brands are getting smarter than measuring the number of views, they invest into the impact you make, the engagement. There are very few brave brands, who are investing into a long-term vision like Bacardi is. It's a combination of views and engagement, are consumers actually talking about the brands? We are still at an early stage in this space said Gurpreet. This session extended offline into multiple other conversations via the conference forums. The solution for integrating brands into music in more sustainable formats, with a long-term view and data collection, reporting.