Digitas | Izdziedam 100 (Sing 100)

The Task

Elektrum — the leading energy seller in Latvia and one of the biggest in the Baltics — challenged us to create a brand image project to engage virtually every Latvian and reinforce the brand’s "friendly energy" positioning in the context of Latvia’s 100 years celebration. Acknowledging the facts that a) Latvia is a singing nation (ask any Latvian) and b) Elektrum is one of the sponsors of the Song and Dance festival, we knew exactly the kind of friendly energy we would generate this time.

The Solution

We created a crowdsinging app — the first of its kind — called “Izdziedam100” (”Sing 100”), where any Latvian could browse 100 years of the most important Latvian songs, pick any of them and sing, together with a celebrity or alone, the whole song or its part. All singing is collected and mixed together into the most comprehensive Latvian digital folklore monument that will be stored in the National Library for the next 100 years.

A History in Singing

We collected 200+ songs, grouped by decades, styles and historical importance, that define Latvian cultural space from the pagan years to nowadays, and re-recorded each of them as minus- and plus-tracks for karaoke singing using your phone or desktop computer. The app was launched in November 2017, when the country turned 99, during a 3-night ambient event in Riga, and was re-activated every 2 weeks with new songs, events and media pieces.

Going International

Not satisfied by just launching the app for Latvians living in their motherland, Elektrum made the project popular among Latvians that left the country, looking for greener pastures across the EU and USA, but who still wanted to be connected to their roots and culture. These Latvians got an unprecedented chance to celebrate the anniversary while staying abroad. Also, we used the app to congratulate our neighbors, Lithuania and Estonia, with their respective 100 year anniversaries, adding celebration songs in Lithuanian and Estonian to the project.

Results

As of November 2018, the project has set record KPIs of 170,000+ singers and over 500 hours of singing published (+ much more in “private” mode). 1 in 10 Latvians sang a song in our app. What is even more delightful, some competitive brands followed our path, launching similar projects 3-6 months after we launched ours. Because when one Latvian starts to sing, others always join.