I've been reading "Guerrilla Marketing" by Jay Conrad Levinson, and one of the major themes he talks about is commitment to your marketing campaign. You can have the greatest marketing campaign idea, but if you aren't committed to seeing the campaign through to the success you know it will reach, then you aren't ready for that success.
Last year we came up with a campaign for Akaplea Jonz -- "Will you be my fan?" It was so simple, but the potential was huge. People go a round-about way to earn fans, or prove why they believe they deserve your support. No one was asking people strait up what the fan wanted or if they even wanted to support you. We were developing this idea as a new relationship between artist and fan, a "fanship." No entitlement; a mutually beneficial relationship based on giving the fans what they want: good music, in exchange for what we needed: support [you may have thought I was going to say money for financial sustainability, but that is all part of my master plan].
Visually the campaign was set up much like a note you sent to your crush in elementary school asking to check the box if they liked you or not. We wanted to ask people if they would want to be a fan of Akapela Jonz. We even had a script written up by Jared San Antonio to go along the same idea that the famous viral old spice commercial had to display how Akapela Jonz was the better choice...["look at your rapper, look at me, look at your rapper, back at me....sadly, your rapper, is not me...but he could be LIKE me if...] lol still cracks me up. We never filmed it though. I wish we would have.
So here is where we went wrong.
We let it run for about 5 months, and started planning ways to build on it and add to it -- develop it. It ran all the way through turning into his mixtape. But once his EP was release the campaigned stopped. We didn't keep it going. Part of it was we didn't feel that it was getting the results that weexpected wanted -- so we let it go.
Last week Akapela Jonz rocked at the Playground Festival in Irvine, Ca. There were thousands of people there, many who had never heard of him. You can imagine how practical this campaign was for a bunch of strangers. We were completely out of the "Wake Up and Dream" stickers and I JUST so happened to find a small stack of those stickers you see below. So in the guerrilla mindset that we had we used those stickers to present to people walking by and ask if they would be a fan of Akapela Jonz, BUT they had to wait to make their decision until after they saw his set. The results were amazing!
Finally I made the connection with what I had read. We abandoned the campaign too early. It never had enough time to truly reach people. It was so short lived that the staff had even forgotten about it all together. So last week we made the decision to revive the "Will you be my fan" campaign. I really feel the potential for this is huge, but its going to take time. This time around we have to commit fully to its success. If you have been to my facebook recently, you'll see how committed I am.
So now that leaves me with one question, Will you by my fan?