The biggest challenge that both brands and artists face today is rising above the noise of information clutter that surrounds their audience. Brands are becoming increasingly inclined towards teaming up with artists to reach new audiences by breaking into new markets, to add more spunk/personality and most of all to stand out. They also end up cashing in on the buzz created by musicians and tap into the genuine connections their fans have with them. For the artists, brand partnerships help them primarily provide the monetary muscle to help strengthen their fan-base and carry out branding activities for their own selves.

Brands collaborating with artists in India

Talking about some Indie partnerships in India, Puma did an interesting collaboration with its campaign “Suede Gully” which was all about celebrating the street. Partnering with icons in music, they featured 8 rappers, 36 dancers, and 7 artists, it paints a world of Indian gullies that have come alive with art and music. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85JyiiDHFbQ[/embed] There was also an interesting partnership between Nokia and Dhruv Visvanath, wherein he made music and put up videos using Nokia Lumia 640 XL as part of the collaboration. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sobIG6_J_qg[/embed] In addition to this Red Bull has a “Music academy”, which while didn’t enter into an exclusive partnership with any artist, promoted various Indian artists in an attempt to foster creativity in music. Nucleaya's untold story via Redbull TV Budweiser on the other hand has invested a lot of it's money and given away it's brand name to help push electronic music in the India with it's collaborations with boxout.fm and many other projects. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wXafTUriZg[/embed] Below are some some large-scale international partnerships.

International collaborations

Lady Gaga and Doritos

For the famous SXSW showcase held in Texas, Doritos shelled out $2.5M for Lady Gaga’s performance. This was part of their #BoldMissions campaign, wherein to attend the show one had to complete tasks of boldness. Some of these acts were changing your relationship status on facebook(to something other than what it really was), getting risky haircuts and in some cases to surrender one’s suitcase at the Austin Airport for 48 hours. And not just the audience, but even journalists had to complete the #boldmissions to get entry. Through this campaign, Doritos saw 50% increase in Twitter followers, 700% lift in mentions and 3000% growth in retweets. There was also more fan engagement on their Facebook and Instagram. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKAD_VJRWmI[/embed]

NFL and Bruno Mars

This partnership offered value for both in a way that was beyond money. Bruno Mars performed for NFL during Super Bowl in 2014 for exactly $0. Why? Because that’s how promising the brand match was. He ended up earning $96M worth of earned media for 12 minutes of his performance. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2i0Bc3f7jk[/embed]

Jay Z and Bing

Microsoft’s search engine, Bing has extremely low penetration and lacked relevance for audience. To create a real life demonstration of benefits that Bing has over other search engines, they partnered with Jay Z for their joint campaign - #decoded. They used Jay Z’s autobiography launch to create an interactive game-like experience. They put every page of the book in different locations based on what the content of the page was. Bing  helped Jay Z’s fans discover the book one page at a time in real-world locations. Every player was striving to be the first one to compile all the pages. Through this Bing wanted to create a culture and they ended up generating nearly one billion media impressions and increased Bing’s market share to the highest percentage since its launch in 2009. In fact they ended up creating a media value that was twice their investment at the same time acting as a great campaign for the launch of JayZ’s autobiography. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNic4wf8AYg[/embed]

Jain's Makeba for Levis Circles

Levi’s launched a new spot from agency FCB West celebrating diversity through a well-choreographed look at different cultures. The brand shared in a blog post that its “core beliefs are rooted in empathy and courage.” The brand’s new “Circle” ads summarizes its message, “We are all connected. We are more alike than different. And our differences only make us stronger.” The spot initially delivers that message implicitly, through the power of dance across a variety of cultures. Set to “Makeba” by French artist Jain, the spot opens on a turntable. Various groups of people across the world begin to dance, with each group forming a circle of dancers. Of course, everyone is sporting a Levi’s product of some sort, tying the brand to the theme of universality. While this has done brilliantly for Levis. Jain's "Makeba" has over 32million views on YouTube today. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgcgFP9nGqY[/embed]