By Brian Quinton 04/01/08 StreetWise Gets the Word out to Teens
In many of the areas of promotion the Internet has given rise to, being around for ten years qualifies you as a pioneer. If that‘s true, then StreetWise Concepts + Culture is practically the Lewis and Clark of social marketing, mapping out the territory for those who came after.
The Los Angeles-based agency got its start more than 10 years ago when now-CEO David Benveniste was hired on to promote and manage a new band, System of a Down. Realizing that their label in 1998, Columbia, wasn’t planning to support the band’s first album with as much marketing or airplay as he thought advisable, Benveniste logged onto that new Internet thing. He began visiting chat rooms where young people got together to talk about music and asking members what bands they listened to.
If their tastes ran to thrash metal, he gave them his home phone number and played them cuts from the first album over the phone. If callers liked what they heard, Benveniste sent them a free demo tape and asked them to pass it along to their friends.
“Back then the music industry was completely against the idea of samplers,” says Ryan Okum, President of StreetWise. “When it came to [Columbia Records’] attention that he was doing this, it was easier just to let him continue than to fight it—especially since he had already put together a few thousand kids around the country who were out there promoting System of a Down.”
As a result, when the album dropped, it moved units nationwide—“unheard of for a band of that status without radio support,” Okum says. In 2001, System of Down’s second album debuted at number 1 on the U.S. and Canadian charts and eventually went platinum.
Good things happened for Benveniste’s company, too: other labels began calling, asking to use his community of young advocates to talk up their own artists. StreetWise stayed focused on the music industry for the first four years, but in time Benveniste realized that other marketers could also benefit from good word of mouth.
He also recognized that StreetWise’s business model relied on credibility with its largely teenaged audience, and that cred could be damaged by a product or campaign that seemed crassly manipulative or simply irrelevant to the target group. So StreetWise devised a system under which all its registered members—some 200,000 fans in all—get to vote on whether or not the agency will take on a specific client.
“We refer to the system affectionately as ‘Use It or Lose It’, and it’s still in use today,” Okum says. “Whether you’re an unknown band or Coca-Cola asking us to work on your Full Throttle drink, we go out to the StreetWise community and ask them to vote on the opportunity.”
More often than not, brands get the thumbs-up from StreetWise’s teams because they’ve self-selected; they want access to young people who are interested in getting exposure to something new before everyone else knows about it. The company still works with music labels but finds a lot of its clients in the entertainment and video gaming industries: “Spiderman 3” and the Warner Bros. pictures “I Am Legend” and “300” were all customers, as was Activision’s “Call of Duty 4” game.
Other verticals tap into that youth audience as well: Coca-Cola, Jack in the Box and Nokia have all put promotions in front of StreetWise’s partisans recently.
That fan base ranges from 13 to 35, but the core group is 17 to 24, Okum says. Sixty-five percent of them are male. StreetWise doesn’t recruit through media ads; instead, people who join one StreetWise promotion out of interest are directed to the agency’s fan-facing Web site, www.streetwise.com, and enticed to take part in some of the other campaigns they see listed there.
The agency also doesn’t offer financial rewards for generating buzz, because that’s not what its participants are primarily interested in. “We don’t believe cash compensation is the most credible way to get people talking about your brand or product,” Okum says. “We’ll offer unique rewards they can’t get anywhere else, whether that’s a lunch with [comics creator] Stan Lee for ‘Spiderman 3’ or backstage passes to a Cypress Hill concert. At the end of the day, they’re interested in access to information that they can’t get anywhere else.”
Once joined, those StreetWise members stay active for 24 to 36 months on average. “We view that as a long-term investment for a 17-year-old,” Okum laughs.
StreetWise stays in touch with its members through e-mail alerts and by using member managers who are close to those populations in age and interests. In fact, the company has developed such expertise in managing its own community that, true to its entrepreneurial roots, it has opened a new line of business building and managing online communities for other brands.
A good example was a promotion launched last summer for Activision’s “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” video game. StreetWise created an online destination, www.charlieoscardelta.com, which uses user-generated content, game exclusives, competitive rankings, member loyalty points and social networking tools such as private messaging to make the site a destination for COD4 fans. The community now has more than 600,000 registered members.
Besides getting 600,000 presumably happy warrior wannabes, Activision gets a built-in platform of high-intensity users that can give it feedback on game enhancements and game-related promotions. StreetWise members have often looped back to brands with important input, Okum says. A few years ago, another Activision game tested several versions of packaging copy with StreetWise fans.
“One 17-year-old girl in New Jersey said, ‘These all suck’ and wrote her own sample copy,’” says Okum. “A week later Activision called us and asked for a release to use her copy on the packaging. In exchange for writing the greater part of the packaging, she got a couple copies of the game and a couple of sweatshirts.”
“That goes to our overall philosophy. We don’t walk into a client’s shop, put up a bunch of blackboards and say, ‘Trust us.’ We know why something will resonate with 17-year-olds or college kids.”
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