We partnered with Spotify to create a Music Apps Hack Weekend that would build new opportunities for brands to play in the music space. Out of 300 applicants we invited 150 hackers from all over the world to come to New York City’s SPIN Ping Pong club for one weekend in February to build breakthrough music apps alongside six major brands: CW, Doritos, McDonald’s, Mountain Dew, Showtime and State Farm. Participants demoed over 47 apps, competing for the grand prize of $10,000 and awards from each of the individual brands. Each of the featured brands ran campaigns on Spotify leading up to, during and after the Hacks to get a handle on the existing ad platform in addition to coming up with ways to integrate the newly-created apps into their marketing.Building a fully-functioning and launchable piece of software usually takes months and sometimes years, but our 150 hackers were able to accomplish this in forty-eight hours, in large part to the resources our brand and tech partners were able to provide our 150 participating hackers. Hackathons are by no means a new invention, but our introduction of brands into this environment was a first of its kind activation and the resulting media coverage was a clear illustration of the uniqueness effectiveness of our campaign. Music Apps Hack Weekend resulted in over 14MM media impressions and the creation of 47 Spotify apps, two of which the CW and Doritos are working to bring into market. In addition to paid media, Music Apps Hack Weekend generated a tremendous amount of earned media with featured articles in The New York Times, VentureBeat, Billboard, Contagious and Media Post, over 42 blog mentions and over 280 mentions on Twitter.
http://awardshare.omd.com/Shorty%20Awards/MusicAppsHackWeekend/
