Music in The Round - Viral Brief

Project brief 

This brief for digital productions skills comes in two parts; a 1 minute viral advertisement, followed by a 3 minute featurette. This is our first brief involving real clients and companies, and this was our first taste of what it was like to work for somebody in the real world. And so it soon became apparent that we needed to approach this project in a much more professional manner. 

Viral Advertising

Viral advertising is a marketing strategy, which relies on the medium of the internet, particularly social media, in order to pass the ad around, in turn allowing it to reach as wide an audience as possible.Viral advertising is personal and, while coming from an identified sponsor, it does not mean businesses pay for its distribution. Most of the well-known viral ads circulating online are ads paid by a sponsor company, launched either on their own platform (company webpage or social media profile) or on social media websites such as YouTube.Consumers receive the page link from a social media network or copy the entire ad from a website and pass it along through e-mail or posting it on a blog, webpage or social media profile. Viral marketing may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games,advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, text messages,email messages, or web pages.The most commonly utilised transmission vehicles for viral messages include: pass-along based,incentive based, trendy based, and undercover based. However,the creative nature of viral marketing enables an "endless amount of potential forms and vehicles the messages can utilize for transmission".

Our Client- Music In The Round

From what we have gathered, Music In the Round is a charitable organisation, based in Sheffield's Crucible theatre,that exists to promote the best in international chamber music and inspire audiences with the unique power and intensity of music, played in an intimate setting. 
Our initial thoughts about this company were admittedly quite uninspired, we as a group have little to no interest or understanding of classical chamber music, something which proved to be quite intimidating given the fact that we have to produce an ad to promote and draw people to this charitable company. However, on talking to their director of marketing, Simon, we soon understood that he was completely aware of our initial reaction, and this was something that he wanted us to address in our ad. We got the feeling that it was important to him to get people to realise the huge amount of time and effort it takes these musicians to practice and perfect their musical skills. Admittedly, we had no concept of how many sacrifices these people make for something that they are so passionate about. It made us think how frustrating it must be for somebody to brush off your talent, something which you have invested a great majority of your life into, with the thought of it being 'boring' or 'out-of-date'. 
We immediately settled on the idea of attempting to show the audience exactly what goes into such a performance, as this is something we sensed that Simon was very much keen on portraying. We were also offered the use of one of the musicians own personal music volume books, containing a collection of Beethoven's sonatas. We thought that this would be a great way to emphasise the huge amount of music that is to be learnt and performed by the musician in perhaps just one concert.

The main aim for our viral ad, is to engage a different type of audience than this subject would usually attract. We plan to pose a question to the viewer, in order to provoke them to think more deeply on the subject. Our plan is to provide an answer and explanation in the second part of this brief.