Key Takeaways for Music Marketing with 360° Content (From 75+ Campaigns)

??Since 2017 I've consulted on & created about 75 different "official" 360° marketing concepts on web and social. Most of these projects have been for labels, musicians, artists, and festivals, with a few for universities, SMBs and enterprise clients.

That's not accounting for the hundreds of practice projects and campaigns I've demoed for my own edification / case study development. I really do this because I love it and I'm fascinated with the future of fandom

Some campaigns have blown my mind, a few have flopped terribly. But today I feel like I truly understand how to make this medium shine in creative campaigns.

Here are a few of my key takeaways if you're planning to use 360 content in a campaign:

1. This media format works extremely well for marketing with static discovery-/curiosity-driven concepts, but it can easily underwhelm (in terms of your KPIs) when it attempts a longer-form narrative approach... You've got to remember, navigating 360 spaces is a new experience for many fans still. It's a new UI/UX to understand so it needs to be elegant and intuitive without asking too much.
2. At least in my concepts, people usually first navigate to the left in 360 spaces after landing... possibly because most are right-handed and the left-wards navigation is more natural. I use this to drive more focused conversions in 360 websites
3. When the 360 experience is intuitive to the user, you can reach ludicrous levels of engagement. My high score to date is a 35% overall click rate in a 360 album release website.
4. Always think about the "memory" that your 360 concept will leave fans or customers with. The mind often imprints our exploration of 360/VR spaces as a "place memory" in our brain. When we recall our experience in an immersive space, our brain really care that it wasn't real and thus presents a more visceral memory back thanks in part to the spatial info absorbed during the media experience.
5. Never use immersive content "just because". Certain types of marketing goals fit the media format better, and you'll get predictably bad results if you're using the medium incorrectly. When campaigns add immersive media as an afterthought its ultimately feels out of context in the scheme of a campaign.

I see a new content pyramid that has emerged where producing 360° content as a centerpiece of campaigns ultimately yields:

• Unique 2D content (video / photo / graphics)
• 3D/AR content that can be published on social (by turning 360 content into 3D models)
• Immersive experiences for fans on both web and social, without needing any extra work

Hope these insights can help you out!

Feel free to ask me anything about using 360° and AR content in music marketing (or any other kind of marketing ??).

My email is [email protected]