Intel’s Jayant Murty on the award-winning 'Museum of Me'

Over the past few months it’s also scooped a Grand Clio, a Cyber best of show at Ad Fest and a Webby Award for Best use of social media.

Needless to say, Intel and its Asia-Pacific director of brand strategy Jayant Murty, are “pretty proud” of the campaign’s performance.

“The idea started from the product we were launching — the core i5 processor with the payoff line that it was ‘visibly smart’,” explained Murty in an interview with Campaign Asia-Pacific. “Rather than just talk about it, we decided to give them great visual experiences, that’s where it started.”

Intel started looking for an ideal partner and chose Projector based on their past performance at telling engaging stories. “They have great digital capabilities, they’re competent and they’re passionate,” commented Murty.

The idea development started from asking how they could tell a visual story in a social world. “People enjoy looking through photo archives, why not go through it, get them to go back in time and look at them, in fact why not make it a museum of their lives that they can walk through?” recounted Murty.

Most of all though, Intel wanted to make the campaign something that people would experience and share thanks to the sheer joy that experience provided. “We wrestled for a time about keeping the resulting video private, but in the end, we decided to keep the museum personal even though the experience of creating it is shared,” he said. “It was about creating an oasis of personal experience in a highly public world.”

The detail and execution that went into Museum of Me played a major part in its success. “There are so many variables in making things succeed in an online environment, such as broadband quality. It’s complex but the returns are amazing when you get it right.”

Even the haunting score for the video has a backstory. The composer, Takagi Masakatsu, asked his ardent Twitter followers to send in their voices which he mixed into the track. “It’s an interesting layer; even the music was, in a sense, social.”

A key factor in this campaign’s success, and to the success of Intel’s numerous social and viral campaigns, is that the execution as never about a brand message, not about advertising, or branded content, said Murty. “Don’t fall victim to telling consumers about your product and why you’re so brilliant and amazing.”

Another big learning for Murty is that, very often, brands get caught up with designing highly complex environments, which look beautiful, but ask the consumers to work too hard. “It needs to be simple and easy to enjoy.”

The campaign went viral, he said, because it created an interesting personal human experience which caught the imagination and spread like wildfire online and across international news portals.

“Brands get stronger when people talk about you, not when you talk about yourself. We’ve found, in this social world, it’s not about how often someone sees your brand, it’s about getting people to say, ‘Who did this? It’s great!’. Don’t beat your brand into them, assume viewers and consumers are intelligent and be more subtle.”

Intel’s latest social project was a tie-up with Korean pop group 2NE1 (pronounced two-en-nee-one) and YG Entertinament. ‘Make Thumb Noise’ offered the group’s fans a chance to collaborate on their next music video sourcing votes on the song’s track, title and even video direction. The recently released music video, Be Mine, picked up over 2 million views in just 5 days. Overall, the project received 6 million YouTube Views across all videos and channels, with over a million votes received from fans going into the making of the final song.

“Don’t mistake this for a local execution," said Murty. "In the digital domain you have to come up with ideas that interest the world. Over 65 per cent of our YouTube viewers were from beyond Korea.” Even at Cannes, he added, where the pop group participated in a seminar, 2NE1 were greeted by legions of fans. “I never expected to see a K-Pop band mobbed by fans on the Riviera!”

Murty has picked up a few more pointers from working with the band. “Fans want a part of them, but they also want to participate in what they create. Many brands get users to participate by rewarding them with incentives, but another way is to get people to participate simply because they want to. In this project, people were creating cover versions of the song within an hour or two of it going live.”