Brand Innovators: Music & Brand Summit, London
Nicole Williams, director of brand partnerships at Universal Music Group noted that “a good partnership needs to be a partnership. It is two audiences coming together and making themselves bigger and there’s mutual gain. They get to tap into each other’s audiences and brand equity.”
She cited a recent partnership between Gap and the girl group Katseye as a great example of this type of beneficial partnership. The brand launched an exclusive hoodie with Gap and made content with the band that Williams said looked like a music video. The retailer promoted the content on their own channels, as well as in new markets for the band.
“It needs to have that shared benefit, that authenticity,” she said. “They’re on this huge upper trajectory with so much cultural relevance, so much Gen Z centric cultural capital. And then you of course have Gap. Everybody knows Gap, it’s such a legacy brand. But they were able to come together at this moment where they both had something to gain from that partnership.”
For Samsung, working with athletes is key to its wearables marketing. The brand did a lot during the Olympics. “The athletes were a big part of who we worked with during the Olympics and it wasn’t just as Samsung as a brand, we used our creators that we worked with to really amplify their voices,” said Maria Ogundeji, MX social & influencer marketing lead, EU at Samsung.
For more than 20 years at Unilever brand Dirt Is Good has advocated for children to get dirty through outdoor unstructured play, focusing on unleashing human potential. Football club Arsenal shares a similar belief with the mantra “always forward.” The brand signed with the team in 2023 for collaborations around the idea that getting dirty on the pitch leads to personal growth and joy. Recently, the two hosted the Varzenal Cup, which brought grassroots teams – who had named themselves Arsenal – together with players from the actual Arsenal to compete in the “It’s Part of the Game” effort.
“We look first and foremost at shared values, shared vision,” said Saffron Inkster, global masterbrand director at Dirt is Good on stage at the event.
Victor Bengtsson, chief executive officer of Sidemen Entertainment, a YouTube group with over 138 million subscribers takes a different approach when he works with brands. He referred to “the death of the millennial marketing” in which the brand is integrated into the content and talked about being explicit about an ad that is an ad when making ads for clients from including Lego.
“The creatives today realize that most young people were lied to for a very long period of time,” he said. “It’s like, oh, I’m watching this show. But in reality, this is an Adidas commercial, or whatever it may be. Instead, we started off by saying, hi, this is blatantly a commercial for Lego, which you hopefully like.”
The brand is known for partnering with various IP such as Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, etc. The call-to-action on the video asked viewers to share their opinions on which IP Lego should partner with next. “It turned out to be one of the most successful things Lego did online,” said Bengtsson, who noted that the videos generated feedback from 68,000 who answered 55 questions, which gave Lego the consumer insights on which products to make.
“Did we integrate naturally? Maybe not. It was more literally, ‘Hi everyone, Would you like to collab with us?’ Now, people don’t want to hide, but want to be open about and proud, in a way, of their brand,” he added.