London - This week sees the culmination of T-Mobile’s ‘Josh’s Band’ campaign, as Saatchi & Saatchi releases a three minute TV commercial. The ad features the song ‘Come with me’, written and performed by Josh’s superband and set up using only T-Mobile’s free texts and internet for life offer.
In fact, 1107 band members were involved in the recording of the song and each one is featured on the track. What’s more, the song was released as a single by Universal Records on Monday.
The ad will air on Friday, 15th January during Channel 4’s Celebrity Big Brother, running for the entire ad break at 9.30pm. And while this marks the end of the ‘Josh’s Band’ campaign, it also marks the one year anniversary of T-Mobile’s first Life’s for Sharing ad ‘Dance’, which aired in the same week and during the same show in 2009.
Lysa Hardy, Head of Brand and Communications, T-Mobile UK explains: “In our earlier ‘Life’s for Sharing’ campaigns we created moments that people could share. This time we challenged Josh to show how – using just his phone – he could share his dream of setting up a band. It’s been fantastic to see how fans have interacted with the T-Mobile brand and helped shape the direction of this campaign – which culminates in this final ad spot, celebrating the band’s incredible journey right the way through to the release of their single.”
Paul Silburn, Creative Partner at Saatchi & Saatchi London says: “With each stage of the Life’s for Sharing campaign, from Dance to Sing-along and now with Josh’s Band, we have progressively given more control to the fans of the brand. It’s been fascinating to see how the idea evolved. No-one knew whether Josh would actually be able to start a superband, it was up to him and the British public to make it happen. And they did.”
Josh’s Band started in September 2009 when, for a T-Mobile Voxpop, amateur musician Josh Ward said that he would use the T-Mobile offer of free texts for life to start a superband. And so Saatchi & Saatchi and T-Mobile challenged him to do just that.
Since then, we have seen Josh organise a jamming session while riding an open topped bus around London and have followed him as he toured the country picking up new band members as he went.
But this campaign has social media and user generated content firmly at its heart, with no actors used at any point during the campaign. Everyone involved in the band and featured in the ads has either received a text from Josh or got in touch via his MySpace page (www.myspace.com/joshward84) or on Twitter http://twitter.com/joshward84. Lyrics and music scores were also posted here for people to learn before coming to the jamming sessions.
Additional material documenting Josh’s progress, including his video diary, was available on his MySpace page, while fans were encouraged to comment, chat to Josh and upload their own videos to the page.
In addition to the 1107 band members, Josh has also built up 1,529 followers on Twitter, had 114,995 views on his MySpace page and 52,063 views on his YouTube channel since the start of the campaign.
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