Warner Bros. Records Puts Singer on Map with Low-Cost Mobile-to-Web Viral Marketing Tool
BURBANK, CA, 27 Mar 07 - Ashley Tisdale, the 21-year-old actress whose debut album for Warner Bros. Records bowed at #5 last month, has become the first performing artist to make the charts on her freshman outing with the aid of an Internet-enabled camera phone. The strategy hatched by the record label has turned Tisdale into a YouTube star and helped drive over 65,000 first week sales of her “Headstrong” CD. Ashley’s first single, “Be Good To Me” is currently climbing the Top 40 radio chart, with Z100 (NYC) leading the pack.
Using a handset equipped with one-click image uploading technology from ShoZu Inc., Tisdale has created and posted dozens of personal behind-the-scenes videos that have generated more than 6.7 million YouTube views at an average of 225,000 views per clip. Her YouTube channel has ranked #4 in the music category for months and is the #5 most-viewed of all channels this month.
Tisdale has used the ShoZu phone to chronicle everything from dressing room interviews to a panic over losing her keys, scenes from the album release party, and a live performance of the song “He Said She Said,” all with a girl-next-door demeanor that has endeared her to legions of teenage fans. She has also documented her experiences on tour with “High School Musical,” the Disney production that began with a television movie in which she also had a role.
“Ashley understands the power of posting video directly from her phone and her ShoZu phone is a natural fit for her personality” said Jeremy Welt, VP New Media, for Warner Bros. Records. “While the original goal was to use Shozu to deal with her busy schedule, her Shozu video clips became one of the main ways we built anticipation for her solo debut”
“Anyone can use our image uploading service to share images from their mobile phones with a click, but Ashley Tisdale has proved that a superstar can use it to help build a career,” said Jen Grenz, Global Partner Marketing Director for ShoZu. “It’s a new way to keep your fan base interested, and it provides two critical benefits — intimacy and immediacy — that fit right into today’s culture of celebrity and 24x7 connectivity.”
Tisdale is among of a group of artists that Warner Bros. Records has equipped with ShoZu-powered phones to enhance the use of the mobile channel in their street marketing efforts.
ShoZu’s Share-It service enables users to upload photos and video clips captured on their camera phones with fewer clicks, at higher resolution and to more Web destinations than any other method. Users also have the unique ability to add titles or tags after uploading, exchange comments between Web and phone, and upload any image to multiple destinations for a single data fee. Current destination options include online communities such as YouTube, Buzznet, Flickr, Kodak EasyShare Gallery, MSN’s Windows Live Spaces, Textamerica, Webshots, Pikeo and Moblog.uk; personal blogging sites Blogger, TypePad and WordPress; citizen-contributed photojournalism sites such as CNN, the BBC and Scoopt; and any FTP or email address.
ShoZu also offers a “ZuCast” media delivery service that provides automated, zero-click delivery of videos, photos, music, games, news and other user-selected content directly to the mobile phone. ShoZu’s proprietary data replication technology allows files to be downloaded invisibly in the background without the need for users to open a mobile phone browser, perform complex multi-click navigation sequences, wait for pages to load, interrupt phone calls, start over in the event of a dropped connection, or sync to a PC.
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