Started by Chinese entrepreneurs Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang as an education social network, they soon realized it was a bad idea for them to build an educational app which would not work for them. The entrepreneur noticed few teenagers playing songs and recording a video and got the idea of building a lip sync app called musical.ly.
Launched in 2014 the app installs boomed in 2015 and now with more than 240 million musers (that’s what they call musical.ly users) globally who love to post their lip sync videos online in the most innovative way of producing your own music video. With such heavy downloads almost 49% of musical.ly usage in the United States attracting the age group of 13- 21 years.
The rising popularity of the app has surely caught attention of the brands. And brands like Coca-Cola has used the app to its advantage with the age-old #ShareACoke but this time hitting the new market which is the teens and youngsters through Musical.ly. What was the campaign about? The goal was to re-ignite Coca-Cola’s place in the social conversation and give people new reasons to start sharing and engaging with the brand again. To do this, they moved the measurement beyond paid and owned impressions and focused on authentic social conversations – those that are earned and shared. How did they do this? This time instead of printing custom names the app modified the campaign as per the platform hence printing song lyrics instead and initiated a social challenge to create videos with Coca-Cola’s songs incorporating corresponding lyric bottles.
Collaborating with Jason Derulo helped kick-off the campaign and asked users to share their Coke musicals. The outcome of the campaign was crazy they received 953,000 Musical.ly video submissions (the highest ever for a brand) which generated 134 million views and propelled #ShareaCoke to the #1 trending hashtag on the platform. And the 1st brand to engage influential Musers, they created 2 million engagements on Musical.ly influencer content, which had a 28% engagement rate across social (likes, comments, shares, retweets, favourites) (http://shortyawards.com/9th/share-a-coke)
Even pop stars like Selena Gomez has taken the advantage of the app to promote her song “Kill ‘Em With Kindness” which got her 1.3 million Musical.ly clips and 34.6 million likes, boosting the song’s performance, according to her label Interscope Geffen A&M.
How Indian brands can use Musical.ly as one of the platforms?
Indian Brands collaborating with Musical.ly can be huge, as the young audience makes it an appealing marketing tool for advertisers seeking youngsters who don’t watch TV or listen to the radio.
And with over 8 million organic users from India, this opens a pool of opportunity for brands to cut the chase and play safe and stand out on a platform which is still raw and not punched by brands.
The app collaborated with Ranbir Kapoor and Katrina Kaif for the movie promotion of Jagga Jasoos and hosted a contest where users were asked to create videos with #JaggaJasoos which got them 6,660 musical.ly videos.
YouTubers like BBkiVines collaborating and trending in the top 10 with #DuetWithBB with 18621 music clips.
So instead of going with the herd brands need to take the leap of faith provided by new rising apps providing an instant breakthrough from the competition and staying updated with the youth. This is easier for them to gain visibility without spending much a win-win situation for the brand as well as the app.
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