Mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als and audio­philes alike may be inter­est­ed to learn that Denon and BBDO will be launch­ing an ad cam­paign com­prised of a ground­break­ing 75% dig­i­tal media. This may not be unusu­al for, say, a web­site, but it’s unusu­al to see an elec­tron­ics com­pa­ny push­ing the dig­i­tal media so hard.

Denon are known pri­mar­i­ly among DJs, seri­ous audio­philes, and audio pro­fes­sion­als for their top class equip­ment, but “house­hold name” sta­tus has evad­ed the com­pa­ny in the past. Though their Dxxx series head­phones com­mand a pre­mi­um price, the com­pa­ny occu­pies a mod­est mar­ket share in a niche mar­ket and rarely earn the same amount of cov­er­age as more high-pro­file and fash­ion­able, and fre­quent­ly tech­ni­cal­ly infe­ri­or audio companies.

The aim of this new cam­paign is sim­ple: let peo­ple know just how much bet­ter music can be with the right dock­ing sta­tions, head­phones and oth­er acces­sories. Most of us are used to lis­ten­ing to MP3s through ear­buds or, at best, out­dat­ed stereo sys­tems. If Denon and BBDO prove suc­cess­ful in this mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tive, high qual­i­ty sound may no longer be the province of audio­philes and audio­philes alone. Essen­tial­ly, Denon is try­ing to con­vert the casu­al music lover into an arm­chair audio­phile, and it might just work.

A part of this mar­ket­ing effort actu­al­ly has the BBDO offices inte­grat­ing Denon elec­tron­ics into their own work­place, ensur­ing a deep and inti­mate famil­iar­i­ty with the very prod­ucts they intend to help sell. BBDO will also han­dle dis­tri­b­u­tion and ship­ping efforts for Denon.

Inspi­ra­tion for this mar­ket­ing part­ner­ship has to do in part with the sheer pres­ence of pop cul­ture in our lives in the 21st Cen­tu­ry. The aver­age indi­vid­ual in a devel­oped nation will typ­i­cal­ly iden­ti­fy not just by pol­i­tics, reli­gion and cul­tur­al back­ground, but by the music they lis­ten to and the shows they watch, as well. You have fans of Break­ing Bad and you have peo­ple who nev­er miss a new sin­gle by a favorite band. Our movies, shows, com­ic books and music don’t just keep us enter­tained, they make us a part of spe­cif­ic sub­cul­tures and niches.

Denon and BBDO hope to cre­ate a new part­ner­ship designed specif­i­cal­ly for this frame­work. Try­ing to sell Denon prod­ucts to the gen­er­al pub­lic would be a bit much, but by sell­ing specif­i­cal­ly to tar­get­ed mar­kets, by empha­siz­ing specif­i­cal­ly to cer­tain nich­es the improved qual­i­ty and con­ve­nience you get with the right head­phones and an easy to use dock­ing sta­tion, Denon and BBDO hope that the use­ful­ness of the prod­ucts will catch on and the mes­sage will become infectious.

With a dig­i­tal-heavy cam­paign, Denon and BBDO seem to be aim­ing specif­i­cal­ly for a tuned in, turned on audi­ence, peo­ple who are already famil­iar with dig­i­tal media and who per­haps get most of their enter­tain­ment through stream­ing and down­load­ing rather than on hard copies via DVD, Blu-Ray and CD. By putting a bit of faith into their tar­get demo­graph­ics, BBDO and Denon may reap the rewards of build­ing a mar­ket­ing cam­paign and prod­ucts specif­i­cal­ly for the dig­i­tal generation.