Virgin Digital

Virgin Digital was an underfunded challenger brand about to enter the already crowded online music subscription category. We helped to build the brand from the ground up: from determining their marketing position, to designing their online store, to creating their brand DNA, to launching a campaign that needed to make a big boom for a little buck.

Unlike their competitors (Napster, MSN, Yahoo, etc.), only Virgin could boast a true heritage in music, rather than technology. While everyone else was talking bits and bytes, we would look, talk, and walk like the music junkies we were.

We created their Brand DNA as an internal guideline and a shorthand document to give to partners and vendors we would be working with. We designed their business cards around lyrics of songs about meeting people. The stunning cards not only told people that VD was truly about music, they became fiercely sought-after collector’s items amongst their business partners.

After establishing some of the foundational building blocks, Virgin Digital fired their interactive agency and asked us to take over the design of the online storefront where people could explore the brand and service before they bought a subscription.

When we started to work on the advertising launch, we were convinced that Virgin Digital had the best music subscription service. Their interface intuitively led users to explore the universe of music and find more music to fall in love with. Messing around with it - we felt as though the part of us that digs music was actually growing. Hence, the line “Exercise Your Music Muscle” was born. We considered this to not only be a call to action, but also our creative template. Everything we concepted and created challenged music fans to Exercise Your Music Muscle in some interactive way. And in the end, we were able to create pieces that people didn’t flip past after 5 seconds, but instead stared at for hours at a time and passed along to their friends.

We first launched our universe of music as a street scene where over 70 visual metaphors for names of bands and singers co-mingled. We ran it in a few handpicked magazines and posted it on the Virgin Digital website as a download and it circled the globe almost instantly.

People posted it on their websites and created blogs devoted to deciphering metaphors. We received emails and phone calls from around the world. The foreign press picked it up (even though the service was only available in the U.S.) and called it an “international mania.” And a major newspaper in Brazil created their own version featuring Brazilian bands.  By the end of 2005, it was considered one of the top web images of the year.

We partnered with Heavy.com and turned the piece into an interactive game on its own dedicated channel. The contest drew even more attention and we received more than twice the expected number of hits.

We printed up gorgeous handouts to be given away at the Virgin Megastores that featured a high-quality poster of the print piece when fully unfolded.

VD couldn’t afford TV and instead asked us to make an in-store video. Knowing that we could get more viral mileage if we continued to challenge people to Exercise Your Music Muscle, we created an animated universe of music, with metaphors for song titles this time. We wrote in 35 song titles, but people saw hundreds more. (my favorite interpretation was the “We Are The Champions” basketball players as “Ebony and Ivory”) Again, the video was an overnight phenomenon on the web and became the number one viewed clip on sites like adcritic.com. And once again, people around the world created an online community dedicated to deciphering an ad.

Which is why it’s all the more sorry to say that a few months after our successful launch, Napster swooped in and bought Virgin Digital, ending the beginning of a beautiful story.

ACD/CW: Kristina Slade
ACD/AD: Rodrigo Butori
AD: Andre Fiorini, Noah Clark
CW: Dan McCormick
CD: Court Crandall
Photographer: Vincent Dixon
Animation: National TV