Mike Jones

Problem

You can ride all day long
But you'll never catch Mr. Jones

So begins Mike Jones' latest single Mr. Jones. After his debut album Who Is Mike Jones? sold over 3 million copies, the rapper was justified in making such a claim. However, with limited exposure since the 2005 release, and a new album on the way, it was necessary to reach out to fans and make sure that they remained loyal to the Houston area rapper.

Mike Jones is often credited with generating national exposure for the Houston rap scene. The popularity of his breakthrough single, Still Tippin', helped pave the way for other Houston-based artists like Slim Thug, Paul Wall, and Chamillionaire. With so many familiar artists from the area, all utilizing a similar, laid-back style, it became a challenge to resurrect Mike Jones as the man that made it all happen.

Approach

In conjunction with the marketing team at Warner Brothers Records, Gupta Media devised a two-part strategy for the Mike Jones campaign. To reconnect with fans, the decision was made to take advantage of social networking, and direct users to Mike Jones' recently redesigned Myspace page. Here, users would be able to stream music, videos, and display other unique content.

Header for Mike Jones MySpace page

The second goal of the campaign focused on promoting the music video for Mike Jones' new single on BET's daily countdown show, 106 & Park. Our goal was to create a sense of urgency, and encourage true fans to visit the voting page and help the video stay on the countdown.

Results

Finding the right keywords is a vital part of any search engine marketing campaign. With Mike Jones, the challenge was not only finding the keywords, but also making sure we were reaching the right people searching for them. With keywords like mike jones, the american dream, and mr. jones it was necessary to use extensive negative matching and excluded words to ensure that the people seeing our ads were truly searching for Mike Jones, his The American Dream CD, and the Mr. Jones single. In the end, over 200 words were added to the campaign for negative matching, to eliminate any confusion.

In just three weeks, we were able to deliver over 50,000 clicks to Mike Jones' Myspace page. Our extensive negative matching and ad optimization helped to reach the right audience, which ultimately kept the cost-per-click at a low $0.075 average. In addition, our efforts in influencing voting on 106 & Park were able to help keep the Mr. Jones video on the countdown for over a week. The combined success in both of these objectives helped generate an early buzz for an album that was still 2 months away from release. We are very pleased with the results, and look forward to helping out again when the CD is released.