Leverage is one of my favorite words. As in: leveraging something to create something more valuable. To me “leverage” in the world of digital marketing is a really important concept and I recently ran across a great example of this.

The Current.org is a radio station run by Minnesota Public Radio broadcasting out of St. Paul Minnesota serving the Twin Cities market. I knew nothing of this hip “indie rock” radio station until I stumbled across it on YouTube. YouTube? How did I learn about a super cool radio station while surfing a video sharing website? Leverage.

You see The Current.org regularly schedules musical acts to come into their studios to play live on the air. This is nothing new of course. And it’s nothing new that they stream these performances along with their normal broadcast fare over the internet. The twist here is that they professionally video tape these performances using multiple cameras in their beautiful studio in Downtown St. Paul.

The production style and quality is simple and directly engaging. Nothing fancy, nothing to distract from the music. They then stream these high quality videos on their own YouTube video channel. This web space they created on YouTube directly targets and appeals to the Generation Y (aka Millennial) demographic (18-32 years of age) who seek out entertainment on the internet. See our previous post on generational use of the internet. Thecurrent.org has 128 videos on their channel with millions of video views.

So this radio station leveraged a common activity in their industry (live musical performance), and took it a couple steps beyond what a regular radio station would do and was able to create a whole new product (music videos). They then leveraged these music videos via a social media website (YouTube) to entertain their core audience (millennials) and thus promote their radio station to this audience.

Take Away:
By being smart and adding value to what they were already doing they were able at add some significant dimension to marketing efforts.

Here's one of the videos they have on your Youtube channel. Gotta love Peter, Bjorn and John.