We built and designed a completely custom site to both highlight The Aces new look and photos and provide a place for the listening party voting to take place. Our custom interface allowed votes to be counted both from the top cities streaming the single as well as the top cities voted for on the site itself. This also enabled us to collect contact and location data for fans of the band, so that they could later be notified for shows in their area and retargeted upon the album’s release to purchase.

Background

Red Bull Records, the music branch of the global energy drink brand, came to ICON with a challenge. One of their bands, The Aces, had a new record coming out, and wanted to connect with their fans in a new way - through listening parties.

Goal

Fans would join with the band to listen to the new record together, as the band travels the country. To best determine where to hold these parties, they wanted to run a contest where fans could vote for which cities the listening parties should be hosted in.

Solution

ICON would build a website where fans could vote for their city by streaming The Aces new single, “Daydream”, or by registering their information once per day on the site. This would verify each vote as being associated with a real person by capturing their name and location.

Deliverables

We built and designed a completely custom site at https://theacesofficial.com to both highlight The Aces new look and photos, and to provide a place for the listening party voting to take place. Our custom interface allowed votes to be counted both from the top cities streaming the single, as well as the top cities voted for on the site itself. We were able to verify that real people were voting, as well as limit fans to one vote per day by verifying their vote through a unique code sent to either their phone number or email address. This also enabled us to collect contact and location data for fans of the band so they could later be notified of upcoming shows in their area, and it allowed us to retarget them upon the album’s release for purchase. To display results, we implemented a live leaderboard on the website showcasing the top cities in both categories.

Technical Approach

There were 3 primary technical challenges for this website that we encountered: voting, streaming rankings, and performant animations.

For voting, we needed to create a system that allowed for an individual to vote once per day, but also allow multiple different ways to vote. We built this system from the ground up, and integrated directly with social media to allow the additional voting. This provided Red Bull Records with a lot of insight into where their engaged audience was, but also how they interact with the band.

In addition to displaying cities by their vote totals, we also wanted to rank cities by the amount of daily streams. Unfortunately we could not obtain data at the granular level that we were looking for directly from streaming platforms, however working with an analytics company, daily reports of streaming numbers could be pulled into the site and updated.

With a minimalist design to the website, small animations throughout were needed to keep users interested and engaged. We also needed these animations to not hinder performance or load times in any way. Using the anime.js library to create scripted timeline-based animations and the interaction observer API we could control the movement of the site, while keeping everything smooth and fast.

Results

The results speak for themselves. Over 7,300 people voted on the site for the band to visit their city, capturing exactly 7,322 phone numbers and emails tied to location data. Each fan voted twice on average, for a total of over 14,000 votes. Fans voted from 140 different cities around the country.

Engagement for the site skyrocketed over the course of the contest, increasing over 200%, with the average visitor returning to the site 3 times per day to vote and check the results. The contest was a success - The Aces will set out on their listening tour to meet their highly engaged fans, which were able to target down to the city. Additionally, Red Bull Records gained a rich data set and a deep understanding of their band’s customer base, which they will be able to use to build targeted campaigns in the future.