https://www.liannelahavas.com/liannelive

The week that Lianne La Havas released her remarkable debut album she played two shows at the Village Underground in London.

To promote the album’s release we arranged to film the second night and stream it online. Electric Lighting Studios were commissioned to handle the filming and streaming side of the event. Having worked with them numerous times, I knew they could be trusted to deliver great footage and a reliable stream.

It was my job to assemble and configure the players to house the stream. Lianne has a significant international following so this event required a lot of global considerations. The majority of international territories secured media partners to host and promote the show. All the media partners had exclusive rights for their country so the players needed to be geoblocked for any visitors from other territories.

I wanted to ensure that, despite all the geoblocking, fans wouldn’t have any trouble watching the stream. Rather than creating numerous Brightcove players for each territory, I set-up one embeddable player page with geo-detection built into it. If a fan viewed the player in the wrong country then they’d be presented with a message linking them to a site where the player will work in their country.

To keep the messaging incredibly simple I registered a smartURL that would direct people to the correct media partner where they could view the stream. The tweet and share buttons would always share the smartURL ensuring that all global traffic was directed correctly.

I re-used our #liannelive twitter crowd to display the faces and comments of fans tweeting the hashtag. The crowd did an incredible job and got #liannelive trending globally on Twitter while displaying the full crowd on multiple media partner websites.

To streamline the set-up process I wrote a script to dynamically generate the player embed codes. The digital marketing teams in each territory could easily generate the embed code they needed by setting the player’s width, country and whether or not to include the twitter crowd. The form would return an iFrame embed code that manipulated the content appropriately. The embed-code generator greatly simplified the process of dealing with multiple media partners in different territories.

To promote the stream I used a SmartURL that ensured all fans were directed to the correct website in their territory. This meant that Lianne only needed to post one link on her social networks and the sharing functionality on the player would also use a single link.

Managing a campaign with such international reach and multiple destinations could have been a messy and tedious process. In a very limited time, I was able to simplify and streamline the processes and ensure that all international marketing teams, media partners and fans had a flawlessly executed online event.