Case Study
INTERSCOPE RECORDS
TAPS SOCIAL NETWORKS
TO ENGAGE WITH FANS ON
ARTIST SITES
Interscope Geffen A&M Records
creates and manages individual websites for its more
than 100 global recording artists like Lady Gaga, Eminem,
Imagine Dragons and more, with the primary goal of making
it easy for fans to interact with artists they like, the extended
artist fan community and content the artists produce. While
innovation has certainly led to tools and technology to help
them reach these goals, there have been challenges to
solve along the way.
PURSUIT OF ROCKSTAR
ENGAGEMENT
Social networks have made it easy for people to interact
with each other and stay current on news and happenings,
but communities can become fragmented as new networks
become popular. While fans want to connect with their
favorite artists wherever they are on the Internet, it’s difficult
and time consuming to stay active in many networks.
In addition, fan expectations have evolved as a result of the
access to artists they’ve had in the past on various social
networks. The expectation of engagement and intimacy can
be difficult to replicate on the artist’s own website.
Lee Hammond
VP of Technology
Interscope | Geffen | A&M
The key to providing an
engaging experience is
understanding who is
visiting the artist sites as
soon as they arrive.”
Interscope
With a growing number of represented artists, Interscope
wants to provide that highly engaged, personal experience
for every fan coming to their artist websites in a way
that improves on anything a social network could offer.
With an artist community that ranges from hip hop
and rap to country and rock, this is no easy task.
Who Are You?
Key to providing a personalized, engaging experience
is understanding who is visiting the artist sites as soon
as he or she arrives. Ideally, this knowledge would
include basic demographics, but also extend to music
interests, activities and other profile data that typically
requires a registration form with many required fields.
Knowing that most people, and young music fans
particularly, dislike setting up new accounts and filling out
long registration forms, Lee Hammond, VP of Technology at
Interscope, saw an opportunity to leverage the popularity
of social networks to make it easier for fans to engage by
removing a major obstacle: setting up a member account.
“Letting people use profiles they already have like
Facebook, Twitter, Gmail or Yahoo! to log in to the
site has great appeal for both the fans and artists.
Copyright 2014 Janrain, Inc. All rights reserved.
We knew that offering social login would help us
make these connections,” said Hammond.
Interscope could have implemented their own social
login tools but quickly realized that this was out of their
core competencies. As they identified future objectives
and strategies to improve messaging, segmentation,
targeting and communication, it became evident that
login, registration and customer profile management was
best handled with a partner that specializes in that area.
Tapping the Power of Fans
Interscope Records vetted options and decided to deploy
the Janrain Customer Identity Management Platform across
more than 100 individual artist websites to support fan
registration and engagement. For fans arriving at one
of these sites, the journey starts with the simple act of
signing in, and social login makes that incredibly easy.
The Music Fan Experience
When fans arrive at the Phillip Phillips website, for
example, they’re greeted with an opportunity to sign
in with a social profile. This initiates a new relationship.
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Interscope
“Choosing Janrain was the right choice for our
business needs today and they’ll take us where
we want to go in the future.­”
When a social profile, like Facebook for example, is
selected, Interscope is given permission to access
social profile data like interests, activities and friends
so that they can better understand their fans.
With this rich profile data, the fan’s experience can be
improved and personalized. Commenting, sharing and
engagement is easy. And new music discovery becomes
easier, Interscope can suggest new artists or genres that
appeal to other fans with similar profiles. And because
Interscope has deployed Janrain technology across their
artists, if a visitor chooses to visit more than one artist,
she isn’t required to log in at each site, as her identity
travels with her across the Interscope artist sites.
Getting to Know You
Providing social login was just the first step Interscope took
to initiate fan relationships and jumpstart engagement.
As noted above, when a fan chooses to use social
login, Interscope can get permission-based access
to their social profile. This data can then be utilized in
improving personalization and the fan’s experience,
but is only actionable when stored the right way.
With Janrain’s hosted database, Interscope merged all
of their fan records from multiple sites and systems into
one central database, and builds on top of these as they
request permission to access new information. This fan
knowledge is used to improve artist communications
like concert announcements in their hometown,
merchandise availability or multi-artist promotions.
Improving the Fan Experience
Across Technologies
Lee and Interscope Records are at the forefront in
Copyright 2014 Janrain, Inc. All rights reserved.
Fans Connect
terms of offering innovative, cutting edge ways to
improve the way fans can interact with their favorite
artist. As such, they are constantly implementing new
technologies that facilitate these interactions. However,
all of these technologies require a fan to identify himself
initially – after all, how believable is a review from an
anonymous poster, or a leader board without discernable
names? But requiring the fan to login to each of these
different engagement applications would degrade the
experience and could lead to site abandonment.
This desired experience led Interscope to adopt the
Backplane Protocol, a standard co-developed by
Janrain to enable interoperability between different
web technologies by serving as the central hub that
communicates identity information across applications. Put
simply, the Backplane Protocol enables someone to log
in to one application and automatically be recognized by
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Interscope
all other apps that support the protocol. Thus, chatting,
commenting, rating videos, sharing content and earning
loyalty rewards can all be done with one simple login.
Through its integration of the Janrain Customer Identity
Management Platform, Interscope Geffen A&M Records
is breaking down barriers to fan and artist engagement
by making registration and community participation easy
Results That Get A
Standing Ovation
Leveraging the Janrain’s Customer Identity
Management Platform and the Backplane
Protocol has led to the following important
achievements for Universal Music Group:
•
Registration Conversion Rate Increase
A key metric of success for Interscope is growth in their
registration rates, which increased 10 - 50%, depending
on the artist site, which was a clear indication
that they had removed obstacles to signing in.
•
Enhanced Fan Experience
An improved experience for fans who log in once
to access to all Interescope artist websites, and
engage across all engagement technologies.
•
Development Resource Efficiencies
A single integration point that offers a growing number
of social networks and providers makes it easy
for Interscope developers to ensure their APIs are
current and have time to focus on other projects.
•
Turnkey Process for Adding New Vendors
The Backplane Protocol offers a repeatable
process for integrating third-party technologies
into the Interscope ecosystem.
and fun. At the same time, they’ve achieved efficiencies
across their marketing and technical teams that allow them
to focus on their core competencies and objectives.
OLD CMS SOLUTIONS WERE LIMITING AND
“OUR
DIDN’T PROVIDE THE FLEXIBILITY WE NEEDED TO
ACCOMMODATE ADDITIONAL DATA AVAILABLE VIA
SOCIAL LOGIN FROM NEW IDENTITY PROVIDERS.
Copyright 2014 Janrain, Inc. All rights reserved.
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About Janrain
Janrain makes it easy for companies
to truly know their customers and
personalize every interaction. The
Janrain Customer Identity Management
Platform helps companies acquire
customers online, recognize these
customers across all digital touch points
and better understand them by collecting
and utilizing demographic, psychographic and
behavioral profile data. Our solutions, including
social login, social sharing, comprehensive
registration, customer profile data collection
and storage,single sign-on and digital strategy
services, improve the effectiveness of digital
marketing initiatives for leading brands
such as Universal Music Group, Whole
Foods, Mattel, Pfizer, Samsung and Dr
Pepper. Founded in 2005, Janrain is
based in Portland, Oregon. For more
information, please call 1-888-5633082 or visit www.janrain.com and
follow @janrain.
About Universal Music
Group /Interscope Records
Combining the legacies of three of the
most influential record labels in modern
music history, Interscope Geffen A&M Records
embarked on a new tradition of musical
achievement with its unification on January
1, 1999. Headed by Chairman Jimmy Iovine,
Interscope Geffen A&M is a major force in global
music, developing chart-topping artists across a
wide range of musical genres including rock,
rap, pop and alternative. Interscope Geffen
A&M Records is part of Universal Music
Group, the world’s largest music company.