This week’s COTW is a tribute to the reincarnation and revival of a “true classic”: Napster. To announce the return of the new, improved and rehabilitated MP3 king of pop, rock, soul, jazz, blues, metal etc, Napster used an Internet-centric campaign to get the word out ahead of the imminent launch itself. Napsterbits (.com) was the glue which time-released a chronological series of webisodes (another revival from the Web-days of yesteryear) to an amassing audience of passionate enthusiasts.

The creative itself was tightly synergistic and integrated with the actual content—offering teasers and previews to the vignettes themselves. Once the word was out on the street, the creative began to deliver on more targeted and category-specific themes—for example a blues theme for the blues traveler.

The real surprise ending to this story was the fact that when Napster finally re-launched with a cross-media bang, the actual television creative was versioned from the Web vignettes—and not the other way around.

I can’t wait to see what Kozmo does when it returns (wink).

--Joseph Jaffe

The purpose of the banners was to pique consumers’ interest (with bits taken from the vignettes) so that they would go to napsterbits.com and view the whole vignette. When they got to napsterbits.com, they could email the site to a friend, view more vignettes and play around with the site. This was to start a viral spread of napsterbits.com. These banners were the first acknowledgment, and sign, to consumers that Napster was coming back. When consumers viewed the Jailbreak, EKG and Record Deal vignettes, they told the story of the ‘death’ of Napster, the ‘rebirth’ and then the symbolism of the Record Deal meaning it was “coming back”.

This second creative again was meant to tease consumers to have them check out napsterbits.com to view more of the vignettes. The "cool" factor of these banners was to make the consumer want to know more of what this was about. It led consumers to the hip-hop and metal vignettes on http://www.napsterbits.com/ to give consumers a taste of the breadth of musical discovery and knowledge that Napster has.

After sending consumers to napsterbits.com (and teasing them that Napster was coming back), we needed to take a more tactical approach to let them know that Napster was back. We placed this creative on launch day to let the consumer know that Napster is back and to send them to Napster.com. But along making this announcement, we also needed to let them know that Napster offered all the music that they wanted, hence the banner campaign line “Come Get Your Music/Metal/Hip-Hop/Blues.” We took over sites using Eyeblasters, wallpapers and banner takeovers with all the different creative.
-- Dave Smith, Media Director, MediaSmith

Napster was going to relaunch, and it had a couple of formidable challenges. One was it had to resurrect this brand that had been considered dead for two years. So the company had to raise awareness that the brand was coming back, and had to convince everyone that Napster was still relevant—Napster is still cool but you have to pay for it. It was a renegade brand that I think had about 97 percent brand awareness. Everyone loved it and had a huge emotional connection with it because it was a free service, and that was changing, so we had to change people’s attitudes about it.

Everybody knew the story of Napster. There was a passionate emotion that people felt for the brand and we had to try to recreate that and tell that story. We wanted to give audiences somebody to root for, and so we took that logo, brought that logo to life, and created a character out of it. We wanted to tell an autobiographical story of the rise and fall and rebirth of Napster as told through this character, and try to get everybody to remember the story and root for this little character.
-- Tommy Means, Executive Producer, Mekanism