Joss Stone:
Building a bold, fast loading mobile microsite
A marketing microsite aggregating social conversation for a famous musician's world tour.
Joss Stone the world renowned soul singer who broke through to fame and success in the mainstream charts in late 2003, has spent recent years fostering less commercial projects. The spring of 2014 saw Joss embark on an ambitious world tour, which challenged the concept that music tours should only visit the countries most profitable for the artist, and which also integrated her charity work.
Approach
The key aim was to design and build a microsite containing the vital information of the tour, but which also acted as a platform to host the conversation and buzz sounding the tour. We wanted to create an immersive design that seamlessly aligned with and progressed Joss's rich alternative aesthetic. The ambition of the tour needed to be communicated, and the platform needed to cope with a fan base stretching into the millions.
Result
The site utilises deep soulful colours and elegant floral patterns. It uses a world map to depict the ambition of the tour, allowing users to explore the locations easily. In anticipation of an audience comprised largely of mobile users, performance was key – in development we used a mobile-first approach, using vector graphics for resolution independence. On launch, the website saw several thousand concurrent users with average mobile visits at 65%.
Built on Drupal, in collaboration with Alli Price.
Given Joss's vast and active fan base across social media, we suggested a short hashtag to bind the conversation together across social channels. Following use on official social posts, it was quickly adopted by fans worldwide, and used tens of thousands of times throughout the campaign.
Social integration
Social login allowed comments on the different country profile pages, and also enabled user-profiling. This gave fans the opportunity to engage with one another and build the buzz during different stages of the tour.
Displaying fan-generated content alongside official streams allowed a greater feeling of fan engagement, and gave the website more of a community vibe.
