Yamaha Music and Hammerson nominated for ‘Creative Campaign of the Year’ for national 'Play Me’ Clavinova promotion

Yamaha have been shortlisted for the Creative Campaign of the Year award 2016 in the prestigious Field Marketing Brand Experience awards. The nomination is for their ‘Play Me’ Clavinova partnership in conjunction with Hammerson, the owner, manager and creator of many of the best shopping malls across Europe.

The annual awards showcase the most creative and effective promotional campaigns across field, retail and experiential marketing. Yamaha and Hammerson’s nomination pitches the company alongside some of the biggest brands (and budgets) in the world, including Adidas, Virgin Atlantic, Nikon and Ikea.

The idea behind ‘Play Me’ was to bring music making to the masses, and to Hammerson’s shoppers in particular making the overall shopping experience that much more interesting, interactive and fun for all the family.

It’s estimated that during the 12-month campaign millions of customers participated and were introduced to Clavinova across nine of the busiest and most prestigious shopping centres in the UK. Venues included the Bull Ring in Birmingham, London’s Brent Cross, Highcross in Leicester and Glasgow’s Silverburn. Figures from Hammerson confirm that the nine shopping centres combined host over 140 million visitors annually.

Shopping centre visitors were encouraged to play the instruments and upload their performances to Youtube to encourage the widest possible engagement and reach. One keen amateur pianist even used the Clavinova as a backdrop to propose to his fiancée, ensuring huge views and a tremendous feel-good factor. Similarly, a Tesco van driver’s performance brought in over 480,000 views!

With many videos regularly achieving over 100,000 views the campaign was a huge success, exceeding expectations all round. ‘Play Me’ has been covered in The Sun, The Mirror, the Metro and The Mail, and on national TV with regional broadcasters and press featuring regular news pieces throughout the year.

The promotion pulled together local communities and retailers, bringing entertaining, often humorous, and immersive highlights to a routine shopping experience, whilst introducing piano playing to thousands of new potential music makers.

Charles Bozon from Yamaha commented “We are delighted with this nomination as it puts Yamaha and the Clavinova range centre stage with other major lifestyle brands and activities like sport and travel, and has shown that, given the right platform and partners, music making has truly huge market potential.”