THE RUNDOWN

Hard Rock Café International, Inc. is a chain of 175 theme restaurants in 53 countries founded in 1971 by Americans Isaac Tigrett and Peter Morton in London. In 1979, the cafe began covering its walls with rock and roll memorabilia. Still housing the first-ever piece of memorabilia donated to the Hard Rock Cafe, Eric Clapton’s Lead II Fender, originally donated to reserve a space at the busy bar, the London Cafe is as charming and authentic now as it was 40 years ago.

Al Douglas has staged various artists at The Hard Rock in London and this time around Hard Rock Café International presented a new project challenge. Hard Rock Cafe was offering one local band the deal of a lifetime, the chance to perform in front of 40,000 fans at the summer’s Hard Rock Live music festival Hard Rock Calling. To get maximum exposure to this event called ‘Hard Rock Rising Global Battle of the Bands’ Hard Rock Café brought Al Douglas on board to bring in brand sponsors and to assist with finding bands to sign up for the project.

THE GOALS

• Hard Rock Rising 2014 is The Global Battle of the Bands, taking place online and in 82 participating Hard Rock Café locations around the world • Hard Rock wanted to grow its fan base via Facebook and other social media to capitalise on local bands. • Engage the music community with the high-stakes competition.

THE APPROACH 

• Al Douglas introduced the client Hard Rock to the online business client ReverbNation which provides over 2.5 million bands with fans management tools, taking Hard Rocks Battle of the Bands competition global and to the next level using technology from ReverbNation. • Bands register to take part, so Hard Rock was able to leverage this existing community to both promote the contest and simplify the submission process. • All is fair in the love of music and this war of bands, and all bands will battle it out online until the final voting phase.

THE RESULTS

• Hard Rock has demonstrated a deep understanding of the opportunities of new technologies to connect with its customers. • Created one of the largest global battle of the bands. • Engaged 12,000 independent artists worldwide. • Added 950,000 new fans across the Hard Rocks global participating Facebook pages with 240,000 shares • ReverbNation became an ongoing partner towards the success of ‘Hard Rock Rising Global Battle of the Bands’.