Shivani Thakkar

UNBOUND TECHNOLOGIES TAKES 'VIBE VERSES' VIRAL Social Innovative Social Media Marketing Solution Ignites Hip Hop Contest,

Delivers Dramatic Results to the VIBE Media Group

www.unboundtech.com

In January 2007, VIBE Magazine started the "VIBE Verses" Rap Battle Competition with AT&T Wireless. VIBE put up $10,000 in cash and a free recording session in Los Angeles to find the best amateur rapper in the country. AT&T Wireless branding was integrated on all program elements promoting a new cell phone plan and options. VIBE Verses attracted instant attention. More than 70,000 users signed up to listen to 4,000 user-generated

Sapna Rohra

videos. Within two months, 340,000 people watched 1.5 million videos. The contest winner was Lexington, Kentucky-based Old Skooly High with artists Richard Roe, Jae Derty, Uncle Mic and DayV.

UNBOUND Technologies provided its innovative social media marketing solutions to enable the VIBE Media Group to achieve dramatic results, including an extremely high return on investment, from its VIBE Verses Rap Battle contest, the world’s largest online rap battle competition giving emerging artists a new, global platform to showcase their skills.

Expanding Brand Awareness VIBE Verses was launched because the VIBE Media Group was interested in growing traffic on its VIBE.com site, expanding brand awareness, and increasing online ad revenues. The publishing company, whose VIBE magazine maintains a strong franchise among the urban demographic, believed that this special contest would help it to achieve these objectives. VIBE invited independent rap and hip hop artists to record lyrics and post them on the VIBE Verses website where fans would vote on them.

Along with the contest sponsor AT&T, VIBE required a differentiated social media experience targeting the urban community and leveraging social networks and the highly connected "trend spreaders" within them. To support their Rap Battle Contest, VIBE needed precise targeting, quality submission, user-generated video, pre-licensed tracks and voting. To ignite its marketing efforts and ensure success, VIBE engaged UNBOUND Technologies.

Summary of Campaign Results:

•  More than a 100-fold increase in video streams per month (from 10,000 to 1.2 million) •  60,000 new members registered with the VIBE community •  375,000 unique visitors to VIBE.com •  775,000 media views (widget views, display ads, images, etc.) •  5 million monetized ad impressions from premier brands such as Microsoft and Miller beer •  An 800% return on investment (ROI) for VIBE Media Group

www.unboundtech.com

535 Cowper Street, 2nd Floor Palo Alto, CA 94301 888. 377. 1264

High Consumer Traction Via Widget The entire "VIBE Verses" Rap Battle Competition program was launched on a turnkey vertical social networking platform, which enabled control of the video content with insertion of pre-roll advertisements and high impact flash-based profile sponsor ads.

Social influencers and trend spreaders were provided an interactive video widget containing uploaded content used to drive the target audience to the sponsor's message. Matching the right artists and their fans created the right amount of trend spreaders to copy and paste their interactive video widgets to all of their fans for sharing. The trend spreaders and their fans then shared the video widget among other social trend spreaders. This assured attraction of the target audience to the sponsors brand messaging.

AT&T leveraged the video pre-roll within the widget and interactive banners on the social site targeting the urban market. All contestants had access to free-of-copyright material so that the artists could apply their own rap lyrics over MP3 tracks provided by VIBE, circumventing any copyright issues and enabling the placement of winning submissions on iTunes. Submissions had to align with the sponsors’ requirements and the initial trend-spreader social demographics had to provide quality independent artists possessing high social density in the target community.

The combination of a "sticky" social site along with viral targeting pulled together like-minded individuals, producing a robust community experience. All content submissions were fully controlled, protecting the brand and keeping the quality at a high level to bring in more artists/fans, thereby demonstrating to the community that VIBE Verses was authentic. The willingness of both artists and fans to push the video widget out to the urban community created the viral traction required for a successful campaign. What began with fewer than 21,000 targeted trend spreader “artists" involved ultimately resulted in more than 1.2 million video streams, 40,000 registered users, and 26,000 Widget views per day in just 36 days.

UNBOUND took us from 10,000 to 1.2 million video streams in a month…more than a 100 times lift!

—John DeMarchi General Manager VIBE Interactive Media

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UNBOUND Finds ‘Influencers’ UNBOUND immediately identified highly-connected rap and hip hop artists—the influencers for this contest—in its massive social graph database, engaged them and provided a widget for them to share lyrics with their fan base. Within four weeks of engaging UNBOUND, the contest had gone viral, resulting in 60,000 newly registered VIBE community members, 375,000 unique visitors to the site, 1.9 million widget views, and 5 million monetized ad impressions.

"VIBE needed a social marketing platform that would jump start Vibe Verses," said John DeMarchi, General Manager Vibe Interactive Media. “We were serving 10,000 video streams a month prior to the start of the campaign, and in one month, with UNBOUND’s assistance, we served 1.2 million video streams—more than a 100 times lift. UNBOUND’s expertise and technology made it possible.”