Hellicar+Lewis is a partnership that explored ways of involving music fans in the online world. Their talk at Design Indaba was incredibly witty and put across a devil may care attitude that pushes their work forward.
One example was a live, 24-hour online broadcast from a London recording studio with the renowned band, Maroon 5. Sponsored by Coca-Cola, H+L took real-time input from music fans across the globe and projected it in the studio during the music event. Maroon 5 then took this input and used it as inspiration for a brand new track that they completed in the 24 hours of live coverage.
The success of the event was immediately palpable. It garnered recognition for Maroon 5 and Coca-Cola. People from 139 countries participated; 107,1million trend impressions were counted on Twitter; 35 million impressions on Facebook; and Coca-Cola’s Twitter profile saw a 387% growth in following. Most astounding was the creation of a musical track that thousands of fans influenced and making them all a part of it.
The process leading up to this was not without its challenges and H+L joked about the difficulties of working with Coca-Cola and its various agencies. The sense of “death by committee’ was illustrated by Hellicar who displayed a skull made of hundreds of swirling circles he had doodled during one of the Coca-Cola meetings. Each swirl, he explained, was a point made by one of the committee. That they managed to convince them of the merits of this idea at all is remarkable, yet the success of the project goes a long way to convincing brands that involving their audience is crucial.
By Anton Crone
Screen Africa magazine- May 2012
