Project Brief:
From its humble London beginnings to its long-time home in San Francisco, California, Dolby has become synonymous with quality audio throughout the world.  In fact, if anyone walked into a movie theater, listened to music, or watched a movie at home in the past 45 years, odds are they’re a Dolby fan. The problem is, most people didn’t know it. So Dolby set out to help consumers understand that their technology makes media experiences more real, more amazing and more intense.

Our challenge:  to bring Dolby’s core brand promise to Facebook and create a meaningful and memorable interactive experience that would show how Dolby technology makes any media experience – including Facebook — more intensely entertaining.

To achieve our goals, we knew we would need to do more than tell people about the Dolby difference—we would need to show them.  We started with a simple thought, if Dolby makes entertainment experiences more real, more amazing and more intense, why should Facebook be any different?

So we decided to take something that is rather mundane, like your Facebook status, and make it more real, more intense and more entertaining than it could ever be on its own. We engaged one of the most distinctive and popular voices in American entertainment, Adam West of Batman and more recently Family Guy fame, to host a one-hour, live event called “Dolby Update Theater.” Every member of Dolby’s Facebook community had their Facebook status update submitted for consideration by Mr. West. The best were brought to life, in a live event available only on the Dolby Update Theater Facebook tab. The status updates Mr. West read were offered to their authors as a “More Intense and Entertaining” version of their status update to post on their wall.  These clips, along with the re-broadcast, best-of clips, and behind-the-scenes videos are still available on the Dolby Update Theater tab, offering another look at the event and the campaign:  http://apps.facebook.com/dolbyupdatetheater/

The campaign was supported by targeted online banner ads that promoted the event and ran through select communities and blog networks in the three weeks leading up to the live event.  These banner ads ran on select communities and blog networks including Digg, Mashable, Buzz Logic, and Socialtyze and drove consumers to the Dolby Update Theater tab on Facebook.

Beyond those that tuned in to watch the live video stream on Facebook, over 9,000 videos have been already been viewed. And Dolby’s fan community of entertainment and audio enthusiasts jumped from 3,500 fans to 17,477—a 500% increase! While the full impact of the campaign has yet to be measured, qualitative feedback from those consumers who had their status updates read live on camera has been extremely positive, and wall activity on the Dolby Facebook page has increased 50% since the live event.

Here’s a closer look at the campaign:

Dolby Update Theater from Isobar US on Vimeo.