During my time with Cohn & Wolfe, we worked with our Frankfurt office on the launch of Deutsche Grammophon’s web shop. We were responsible for the digital strategy and English speaking European media relations.

Emphasising DG’s extensive classical music catalogue and the superior quality of it’s 320 kbps downloads, we hit the phones to spread the news to all relevant classical music and arts correspondents.

As well targeting social media blogs, we contacted all influential classical music and arts bloggers, offering them a unique code enabling them to download and sample the quality of the music. These were coded to allow DG to track who was downloading what, from where.

To add life to the blog entries, DG and C&W Frankfurt created a series of online videos featuring top DG artists talking through the ease of digital downloads. We used these to form the basis of online campaigns on the likes of YouTube and Metacafe.

The launch was covered in the majority of the UK broadsheets, and extensively across the web – including one of the first blog entires on launch day by influential New Yorker music critic Alex Ross.

I suggested that we follow up a month later with a story on the success of the launch – this brought in another round of online and offline coverage.