KIick Push, a music-focused ad platform, has partnered with Sony to give consumers free music downloads in exchange for engaging with ads.
On June 17 the two companies signed a deal making the budding startup an approved vendor of Sony's content catalog in the form of MP3 downloads.
Founder Ben Jorgensen has been hounding the music giant for a year to get access to its vast library of music so he can incorporate those tunes into digital ads for mobile and web. He finally got his wish. “They gave us direct access,” he says.
He calls it “Pandora for advertising.” His idea is to use music to get people to click on ads by allowing advertisers to build downloadable music into their campaigns. During its beta run, Live Nation, a company that sells tickets to live events, ran a campaign to get more people to sign up for its email list in exchange for a downloadable song. Clicking on the ad took consumers to a second page, where they could preview a song, enter their email, and download the song for free. There was also an opportunity to buy tickets to an upcoming show and share that you downloaded a song from Live Nation on social media.
What if you don’t like the downloadable song? Jorgensen accounted for that with a “thumbs-down” icon that yields a new song when clicked – just like Pandora. On average, Jorgensen says, users stayed on that second page for two-and-a-half minutes, which is a really long time to spend with an ad. “Music incites a mood. We establish a mood or emotional connection to draw you into the campaign because people want to feel related to,” says Jorgensen. Manipulating consumers with music isn’t new.
Advertisers already work with musicians, but they tend to be on big costly campaigns like Beyonce’s “Upgrade” ad for Direct TV or Chris Brown’s Doublemint gum video. What Jorgensen is proposing is a tailored approach to advertising with a variety of songs. The company collects information about the pages consumers interact with right before and right after they click on a Klick Push enabled ad, and it uses that information to target people in the future and deliver music they’ll like.
Klick Push is a fledgling company. Earlier this month it received $250,000 in its seed round from a few investors, including David Humphrey of DTH Capital Ventures and Guillermo Marmol – so it doesn’t have a lot of cash to spare just yet. Instead of paying Sony a bunch of money to access its library, Klick Push will give Soney a percentage of its sales.
The company is also partnered with music and video distributor the Orchard and indie music platform Reverb Nation.
This is definitely an interesting move for Sony. The music giant already has its own music streaming service, called Music Unlimited, and has streaming deals with Apple and others. But with Klick Push, the company can collect advertising dollars more regularly – if Klick Push can find an audience.
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Sony is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Kōnan, Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Sony Corporation is the electronics business unit and the parent company of the Sony Group, which is engaged in business through... read more »
