MOBO Awards 2020 - Case Study
What is the MOBO Awards?
The MOBO Awards stands for “Music of Black Origin”. Since its inception in 1996, the MOBO Awards has become one of Europe’s biggest and most influential music award ceremonies, celebrating excellence in black music in the UK and Internationally for more than 20 years in the musical fields of hip-hop, grime, RnB, soul, reggae, jazz, gospel, and African music. The MOBO Awards is seen as a UK equivalent to the BET Awards and Soul Train Awards.
What Hypebrid did:
In 2020, The MOBO Awards went digital-first with the help of Hypebrid’s marketing and socials team. In a landmark move and for the first time in its history, the ceremony was premiered online - via YouTube. We were able to reach new audiences, which expanded our digital footprint bigger than ever before, thanks to a groundbreaking partnership with YouTube Music.
Following the MOBO Awards’ three-year hiatus, the organisation needed to ensure the show came back with a bang. Hypebrid’s design team worked with MOBO to refresh their brand identity - with eye-catching visual creative; which was shared across all artists’ social media channels, MOBO Awards 2020 in-show creative as well as the out-of-home experience.
To ensure the event had an immeasurable digital footprint, Team Hypebrid plugged into the MOBO Awards’ marketing team to create an omnipresence, which spanned across: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter & Snapchat.
The Announcements and Nominations
Following the success of MOBO Awards 2017 nomination announcements, the team called upon friends and influencers to announce the categories nominated for the 2020 MOBO Awards on the same day the ceremony’s return was announced.
“8.6M TWITTER IMPRESSIONS
+3.5K TWITTER FOLLOWERS
100K INSTAGRAM REACH
4.3K INSTAGRAM FOLLOWERS (+10%) ”
Pre-Show
Although this year’s show was virtual, MOBO approached pre-show marketing in the same way we would alongside a traditional broadcaster.
We had a graphic promo trailer on and off-platform; a bespoke presenter trailer for MOBO’s social media.
We had OOH (Out Of Home) advertising as London based digital billboards.
We used the YouTube Music app and created a playlist and in-app trailer.
We coordinated the worlds first pre-show virtual red carpet hosted on Instagram Reels.
Using Snapchat we created a pre-show party alongside YouTuber Nella Rose (1M Followers)
“40M IMPRESSIONS SERVED ACROSS YOUTUBE PLATFORMS
2M PROMO TRAILER VIEWS*
735K VIRTUAL RED-CARPET VIEWS (IG / TWITTER)
470K PRESENTER PROMO VIEWS*
4K YOUTUBE SUBSCRIBERS ”
The Ceremony Live
The ceremony itself went incredibly well. We hit:
210,000 views.
126.5K unique viewers.
26.1K Peak concurrent Views (50% up on rated awards).
19,000 Live chat messages.
1.3K Channel subscribers
30.6 Hours watch time.
Outside of YouTube - Team Hypebrid identified that Twitter would be the hub of all MOBO Awards conversation and through a solely organic editorial strategy alongside Twitter, MOBO Awards 2020 truly dominated the platform with:
A Twitter editorial ‘event’ page - usually reserved for events with a live Twitter stream.
2x Twitter UK and Ireland ‘moments’ - pre and post-show.
Pre-show red carpet.
Pre-show trailer - host and promotional.
Custom #MOBOAwards #MOBOAwards2020 and #MOBOLISE emojis.
An exclusive artist 15” performance clips directing to YouTube.
“#1 UK TREND (4/20 UK TRENDS)
9.2M IMPRESSIONS
94K ‘LIKES’
19K LINK CLICKS
13K RETWEETS
+6K TWITTER FOLLOWERS
3.7% ENGAGEMENT (AVGE 2%) ”
Overall
The event marked a huge triumph for MOBO Awards, after an extended hiatus - the campaign as a whole served as a blueprint for awards ceremony organisers as to how best they can maximise a show’s reach during a global pandemic.
See some of the incredible results below:
“Instagram follower growth: 32%.
YouTube subscriber growth: 22%.
Twitter followers growth: 11%
Facebook followers growth: 1%.
Total engagements grew: 200,000
Our overall reach: 2,028,658,352!”
The client was incredibly happy with these results, and although there were a lot of learning curves for both parties, the end result could not have been better.
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