Top 6 online contest ideas for World Music Day marketing
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On the day of the summer solstice each year, the world is invited to celebrate Music Day.
It’s an international observance day that encourages people to embrace and appreciate songs and music across genres and cultures, and as a uniting force across a near universally loved artform, it presents real commercial opportunities.
Now of course, if you’re a music streaming platform, a music-related app like Shazam, a record store, a concert venue, or an instrument retailer, those opportunities are obvious, but music is ubiquitous throughout human society.
Whether you’re selling new movies, homeware, holidays, sporting goods, or anything else, nearly all of your audience will love, or at the very least appreciate, music. This means you can connect with them and make progress on marketing objectives, and one of the most effective ways to capitalise on these observance days is through gamification.
To serve as inspiration to help you gamify your World Music Day campaigns, we’ve prepared our top online contest and marketing game ideas using our catalogue of pre-made game engines.
1. Melomaniacs Match Up (Music Quiz)
Customise Drimify’s music quiz game engine and challenge your audience to identify missing lyrics, artists, and song titles, by either utilising videos or audio files in the question formats (you can even insert a URL from Youtube on the upload options).
Make it a contest: Enable the leaderboard and challenge target customers to make it into your top 20 to be entered into a prize draw. This gives them extra motivation to lock in and really concentrate.
What brands could this work for that aren’t obvious? Most people like, and actively listen to, some genre of music, whether it’s what’s in the charts, what’s getting its second wind across social media, and that’s if they’re not active audiophiles or attenders of gigs.
It’s also fundamentally a digitised version of the essential music round of a pub quiz.
This is a universally applicable marketing game idea.
By using the data collection form to enrich your customer data, and the intermediate content screens and call to action button (CTA) to get across messaging and redirect traffic, you have all the tools to adapt this to any consumer-facing brand’s Music Day marketing.
2. What’s Our GOAT Jingle? (Voting Gallery)
You could approach this idea in two ways depending on the size of brand you are and how jingle-heavy your marketing has been over the years:
If you’re a big brand with a long history of proprietary music in your marketing: You could piggy back on World Music Day AND tap into nostalgia by customising a voting gallery with ads of your best jingles over the years, and ask customers to vote for their favourites.
This is cheap, because you can basically repurpose ads you’ve already made and run them across social media, and it gathers audience feedback to help you update the winning jingle – you know you’re going to bring something back that resonated with your audience.
Think brands like McDonalds and Coca-Cola – no direct correlation to music, but when you think it through, there’s a lot of their own branded music tied up in their marketing that their audiences may remember fondly.
If you’re more of a newcomer without a back catalogue of classic jingles: You could literally create demos of potential jingles and invite your audience to vote for the concept you’ll end up developing.
You could even create an initial video contest where you invite your audience to submit their own versions of jingles for people to vote on. (You can of course set your video contest and voting gallery so only moderated and approved videos make it to your public-facing voting gallery.) This way you’re taking your audience – no, your community – with you for the ride.
3. Oscar’s Odyssey (Pacman)
Do you remember a cartoon called Oscar’s Orchestra?
In the distant future in a city called New Vienna, a talking piano rebels against evil dictator Thaddeus Vent, who has banned music!
It’s the kind of kids’ TV show they just don’t make anymore, but the themes of it are perfectly tailored to what World Music Day is about – appreciating and preserving music for future generations.
In Oscar’s Odyssey, invite your audience to play as Oscar, navigating a maze and collecting and saving as many vinyl records as possible, while being pursued by Thaddeus and his henchmen. The power-up items could be sheet music which give Oscar more strength to overcome the baddies without losing a life.
Tailor it to your brand or cause: This game idea is the mechanics of Pacman, and the idea outline (which would likely need to be changed for copyright reasons), would be great for a nonprofit that’s heavily geared towards communicating to kids the importance of the occasion on which the day is based.
However, you could easily make it a commercial marketing game and code it to your brand, utilising your mascot or logo as a version of Pacman, your products as the power-up items, and a relevant villain to play the ghosts. (Pacman is still eating vinyls or musical notes though, and you’ll need a fun premise to explain that they’re saving music from being lost.)
The prize could be tied to winning a new wireless speaker system, or concert tickets to an artist of your choice.
4. Spin the Record, Win a Prize (Spin the Wheel)
Records spin, and so do prize wheels…
Playing on this, you could customise the individual segments on your prize wheel to look like a vinyl record, with the prize icons over the top.
How could this work for my brand? The premise is down to you, but you just need to be doing some actions related to World Music Day to be able to utilise this music-ified instant win mechanic.
The background, the logo, and the intermediate content screens are all there for your branding.
Not keen on the spin the wheel mechanic? How about a juxslots machine? Or a scratch card turntable-type game?
5. Online Talent Show (Video Contest)
World Music Day is ultimately all about the music, and so is this marketing game idea.
Invite your audience to submit portrait videos of themselves performing 30-second versions of their own original musical numbers.
Only share quality submissions on social media to promote the video contest, and only moderate good submissions for the attached voting gallery too – save the wannabes from themselves.
Who’s this for? This has potential for record labels, social media platforms, instrument retailers, music schools or academies, or other companies who likely have a creative, musical audience.
Adapt it to your niche: Music is, as discussed, a ubiquitous element of modern culture. A major part of movies is the original score or the music used, wrestlers, boxers, and MMA fighters all make their way to the theatre of combat to walk-in music, and some NBA teams still employ arena organists to create “the vibe.”
Maybe it’s a lipsync battle video contest, or a song they have to write along a very specific topic, or like idea two, a jingle for your business. This opens it up to any business that looks to build community and markets with a distinctive sense of humour. Think Irn-Bru or Old Spice.
6. Vinyl Villains: Record Breaker (Bubble Shooter)
Customise a bubble shooter game with different vinyl record designs, and invite your audience to smash them to pieces by shooting together three or more to earn points.
While this might sound like the absolute antithesis of World Music Day, it could be super on-brand for a music streaming platform or an up-and-coming tech disruptor who goes on to send streaming platforms to the museums to sit next to 8-tracks and cassettes.
Expert advice
These concepts can be adapted and easily built using Drimify’s no-code gamification platform, but these are just starting points.
Utilising the intermediate screens, you can immerse target segments of your audience in your messaging using the appeal of gameplay as the lure. You can collect data, promote products and services, influence purchasing decisions, and redirect participants to strategic web pages.
The only limit is your imagination.
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