The APG CEO takes the experiential music marketing to a whole other level.
It started with plucked pizzicato strings and a soulful, unarticulated vocalized glissando that sounds something like 'Whoa-ooah, mmm-mmm."
This while what seemed like millions of LED lights covering the walls, floor and ceiling begin a choreographed dance, synchronized to the loud music's building funky groove. By the time the slinky bass-line kicks in along with the singer's sonorous pleas for "attention," the colored lights are in full flashing splendor multiplied exponentially by surrounding infinity mirrors. That's when the sensory overload kicks-in accompanied by a loss of self.
Except I'm clumsily dancing around the space next to Mike Caren, Warner Music Group's creative officer (and former WMG presdient, worldwide A&R) who is also the head of the Artist Partners Group (APG), and two of his top executives.
"It's probably the biggest endeavor we've ever done to launch a single," Caren says of "The Attention Room," part pop-up store, part technology art installation and ultimately an experiential music marketing initiative for Charlie Puth's new single "Attention." "We invest a lot in great videos," he says, "but this is probably the biggest localized thing we've ever done to launch a single."
Located in a nondescript retail space on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood, the exterior may not have initially commanded your attention, but the aptly-named interior certainly with 200 flashing LED tiles tripping the light fantastic across a roughly 250 square foot booth did thanks in part to a production and creative firm called VTpro Design.
Atlantic Records, APG and Spotify co-sponsored The Attention Room and held an opening party on April 19 that launched the 10 day pop-up space. The room hosted super fan events, a block party, a dance video and even the 25-year old wunderkind Puth himself who stopped by on a regular basis much to his fans' squealing delight.
There were constant lines throughout its run which at times wound down Melrose to the Adidas store and around the corner prompting the pop-up to extend its hours to midnight during the week and 1:00 a.m. on weekends.
Here, though, without any overt signage one wouldn't necessarily know it had anything to do with Puth's new single. There are signs that explain the installation with the three sponsors' unobtrusive logos. There's another that just says ATTENT!ON, which is Puth's first follow up single to his 2016’s platinum album debut Nine Track Mind. But what would a marketing initiative in 2017 be without a social media component?
"The camera in there is capturing a 'boomerang' which is a six second still photo in motion and it's applying the song to it in the cloud and then sending an email to the people," explains Shara Senderoff, the creative strategist at APG who led the installation's planning, development and execution. The images turn up all over Instagram. By the end of the installation's run, more than 12,000 people will have experienced the installation, Senderoff explains, with people whose social media followers range anywhere from "500 to 5 million."
"There's been shares upon shares upon shares," Senderoff continues, "so the overall impressions will be over 75 million worldwide.
A platoon of social influencers turn up at the Attention Room's opening, including: Tanya Rad of the Ryan Seacrest Show, stylist and TV personality Brad Goreski,Gene Simmons' daughter/model Sophie Simmons, lifestyle and fashion blogger Maja Malnar, Models CoryAnne Roberts, Hanna Beth and Zoe Belle Elyse, The Kaplan Twins and social media star Baby Ariel. (This is addition to music execs like YouTube's Lyor Cohen, Atlantic's Kevin Weaver and Jack McMorrow, Interscope's Aaron Bay-Schuck, Spotify's Dave Rocco and Mike Biggane and of course Puth's manager Ron Laffitte, who also turn out.)
Through an app called Hotpoint, Senderoff can see hundreds and hundreds of the Attention Room feeds on her phone. She pulls up ours from eighteen minutes earlier and finds our crew breaking it down. I look absurdly goofy if not downright silly loping around to Puth's incredibly hooky new jam, but thankfully there may actually be an explanation for that: Dopamine.
Apparently the neurotransmitter that is Dopamine, which helps control the brain's reward and pleasure centers, is regularly triggered when we receive attention which is why attention can be something most of us seek. It's also the guiding high-concept behind The Attention Room.
"We literally sat down and looked up what it looks like to be in someone's brain while dopamine is being released," explains Miles Beard, vp of A&R at Caren's Artist Partner Group who says his team worked closely with Puth throughout the Attention Room's planning and execution. "From there we came up with the idea of having this representation of traveling through someone's brain while dopamine is being released and what that could look like as an experience but while masked by this culture of LA and taking pictures in front of walls and creating our own that had a meaning for this song."
Beard is referencing a Los Angeles phenomenon of taking selfies in front of notable painted walls around town. This includes the pink-hued Paul Smith building, the Made In L.A. wall and the multitude of angel wings where Instragrammers and other shutterbugs often point, shoot and socialize.
"I said how can we put music on a wall?" Caren recalls. "How can we attach it so that people scan hear a song when they go into a wall."
All credit for creating what is essentially an experiential dopamine-triggering wall that plays music goes to Caren's Artist Partners Group, which he formed in 2013 under the aegis of Warner Music. The firm, which also includes a publishing division, provides white label services for WMG artists, producers, songwriters, music entrepreneurs and others. Caren left WMG's L.A. headquarters in Burbank three years ago and last year built out a new multi-million dollar space on Fairfax Avenue complete with four recording studios, editing and writing rooms, executive offices and shared communal space.
"We found our place and our position with our partner Atlantic, where we have this tremendous major label that dots all the i's and crosses all the t's on the traditional stuff and we are avoiding any redundancies and creating this entirely different layer for our artists," Caren explains. "It's not only on the creative side but on the marketing side, on the digital side and doing things in detail and in sophisticated ways that are hard to do within a major label that has so many artists and so much happening at once."
Thus far, APG has some 18 employee who have worked with a cavalcade of WMG music stars beyond Puth and who are incredibly diverse. This includes Kehlani, Keith Urban, Kevin Gates, David Guetta, Sage the Gemini and Wiz Khalifa among many others. In fact, Caren himself collaborated on songwriting and production with artists like Beyoncé ("Ring Off"), Kanye West ("Hell of a Life") and David Guetta ("Where Them Girls At").
Caren says APG will offer a road map for the Attention Room the foreign territory partners and that there are potential aspects that could be used for a touring installation. A lot of content was shot in the space that will live outside of the installation, including a dance video and graphics may be used for a remix video.
Meanwhile Puth has an upcoming North American arena tour on Shawn Mendes' "Illuminate World Tour" which begins July 6th at Portland, OR’s MODA Center.
"It's a great time for music," Caren says as we're leaving The Attention Room. "We're putting out more than we ever did and our artists are just so motivated and inspired by this creative freedom they have to do anything they want."
Clearly, that's something Charlie Puth now knows all about.
