Our client, Microsoft, is one of Opts oldest and best clients. In Spring 2005, they asked Opts to help build excitement around the MSN Music brand at a grassroots level among music enthusiasts.

After a national call for entries, we plucked 6 music lovers from their everyday life and put them all together on a bus for 10 weeks. They headed to their first stop just one week after the call for entries, in Nashville, to attend the Bonnaroo Music Festival.

The team traveled the USA for 10 weeks, stopping at key music festivals and local music scenes along the way. While at the festivals the team set up a lounge outside the bus and invited consumers to talk about MSN Music, hand out download cards and other goodies.

Each team member acted as the eyes and ears for their genre, recording their reviews, pictures and experience in their daily Blog, and combining their efforts to create an online music magazine.

This grass roots effort, The Mother of All Road Trips, netted MSN Music a stunning 3.7 Million impressions. The team handed out hundreds of thousands of free download cards, and their human touch helped MSN Music achieve their highest redemption rates ever.

Exclusive Interviews were conducted with some of music's most popular artists, including Dave Matthews, Keith Urban and Kelly Clarkson, attracting the many thousands of fans to the online Magazine. Local Television and Radio stations broadcast live from the MSN Music Lounge outside the bus, and their were over 300,000 visitors to the website.