Budweiser, the world’s biggest beer, has come up with the stunningly original idea of sponsoring a series of concerts featuring some of the most over-used celebrities in music today. There will be a series of 9 “Emperor” concerts, according to AD AGE CHINA featuring the likes of (you guessed it) David Tao, Cheng Chen-Yue and Eason Chan.
Around these centre pieces, Budweiser will run a King of Karaoke competition, put up the mandatory SINA blog and WAP site and have Budweiser “Beer Gardens” at the concert venues.
In our humble opinion, something has to change. Music is a viable platform for brand association, but it has to be done in an interesting and creative way. Simply slapping your brand onto a series of concerts, featuring artists that have all appeared recently in other brand activities (alcohol, FMCG, automobiles, mobile phones) will become stale very quickly (if it hasn’t already). In a market with relatively few well known stars, brands and their agencies simply have to start coming up with more original ideas. To give this critique some perspective, David Tao has associated with/ endorsed/ been sponsored by the following brands in recent years:
- Ford
- Disney
- Sprite
- Sony Ericsson
- McDonalds
- Honda
- Volkswagen
- Hennessy VSOP
- Big John
- Rejoice
- Kangshifu Ice Tea
How do brands get any sort of penetration by working with these guys? The kids get confused, and end up just seeing the artist, as opposed to the particular brand. Eventually they get jaded by the whole thing. End result, brand and artist both suffer.
