T R A F F I C  B U I L D E R
	Exhibitor: Napster Inc. Creative/Production: Grand Central Marketing Inc., New York, 212-253-8777, www.grandcentralmarketing.com Show: DigitalLife, 2006 Budget: $80,000 Goals: Develop an unconventional but low-cost booth to differentiate Napster from traditional exhibits at DigitalLife. Generate press coverage. Draw 500 attendees to the booth each day. Results: Created an exhibit on an $80,000 budget that was a departure from traditional DigitalLife exhibits. Generated press coverage on “The Howard Stern Show,” and in PC Magazine. Attracted approximately 4,000 attendees during the four-day show.

o one knows what it’s like to be the bad man,” sang The Who in “Behind Blue Eyes.” But Napster Inc. knows. The Los Angeles-based music-downloading service proved it at the DigitalLife 2006 show in New York, with a burlesque-themed exhibit that featured more strippers and songs than you could shake a pastie at. But the grin-and-bare-it booth wasn’t just sex-for-sex’s sake: It came out of Napster’s calculated cultivation of its bad-boy image.

Appearing out of no-where in 1999, Napster was the evil-genius spawn of Shawn Fanning, a college freshman dropout who developed the free software programs. Users could locate and trade music files online with anyone, anywhere, anytime — and never, ever pay a cent. By February 2001, 26.4 million people were trading songs with it. Panic stricken that the music industry was going to go the way of the Backstreet Boys, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) suffocated Napster with lawsuits. By July of that same year, the fat lady had sung.

So in 2003, when Napster regrouped and resurrected itself as a legitimate music-subscription service, it had earned a “bad to the bone” image it had to shed — or play up. “Coming out of our rogue days,” says Becky Farina, then the corporate communications director for Napster, “one of our brand attributes was being edgy, hip, and a little bit in your face. We’re always ready to push that envelope.”

Ya Gotta Have a Gimmick

To live, well, down to its reputation for the DigitalLife 2006 show, Napster turned to Grand Central Marketing Inc. (GCM). The New York-based company had already proved it could design an exhibit around Napster’s rebel-yell image. In 2005, the first year the company appeared at the show, GCM promoted Napster by taking an unexpected, out-of-the-box approach. “We decided to zig where others zag and go as low tech as we could,” Matthew Glass, CEO of GCM says.

Called “Napster Garage,” the 20-by-20-foot 2005 booth was partly inspired by the grunge music movement and partly by Napster founder Fanning, who ran the original, short-lived service out of his own garage. GCM scavenged rummage sales, thrift stores, and the Salvation Army, hauling away beat-up couches, beaded lamps, scratched guitars, back issues of Rolling Stone, and plastic milk crates filled with vinyl records, and then stuffed its booth with these castoffs to create an image that canceled out the stuffy, slick look of the show’s more conventional booths. By the end of the show, Napster had scooped up DigitalLife’s award for best booth and 100 new subscribers, more than twice what it expected. “Now we were in the position of ‘How do we top ourselves?’” Farina says.

Napster didn’t want to be caught singing the same old rebel-rousing song at DigitalLife 2006. Instead, the company wanted to set itself apart (again) from the other 203 exhibitors, and tout its Napster To Go subscription offering, where, for a monthly $14.95 fee, you can access its entire catalog of more than 3 million songs and transfer as many as you want to your MP3 players, cell phones, and PDAs.

Even though Napster has nearly 830,000 total subscribers, it can still seem like the warm-up act for Apple Inc.’s hipper iTunes, which has sold more than 3 billion songs since its debut in 2003. “This time we wanted to convey the advantages of subscription by titillating the consumer,” Farina says.

Strip Search

To prepare for their down-and-dirty booth, GCM and Napster put their noses to the bump and grindstone, and researched the history of stripping to create an authentic look and feel. They pulled bits and pieces from several sources — such as “Les Girls,” a photographic history of feathered and fishnet-stockinged strippers in postwar Paris’ famed Lido Cabaret, histories of notorious pinup queen Bettie Page, and “Teaserama,” a 1955 documentary film about storied burlesque acts, such as Tempest Storm and Lily St. Cyr. The look Napster and GCM determined they wanted — a kind of retro-kitschy 1950s naughtiness — also allowed them to preempt any objections by casting the exhibit in a historical and ironic light, instead of a booth with nothing but gratuitous T&A.

They sifted through a database of hundreds of models, and hired three 20-something models/dancers, in blonde, brunette, and redhead flavors. One of the models, who teaches aerobic pole dancing, choreographed an acrobatic routine for the trio, including some love-to-love-you-baby pelvic thrusting Napster would have had to put a Parental Advisory sticker on. Napster and GCM realized they had better wind the volume down on the dancers’ routine before the show because “We really didn’t have a Plan B if anything went wrong,” Farina says.

The Booby Trap

The 20-by-20-foot exhibit looked as if Napster had trucked a Scores franchise onto the floor of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Called Napster Purrlesque Lounge — the pun played off of the company’s trademark cat-wearing-headphones logo — the booth of galvanized aluminum, cast in a wavelike moiré pattern, was essentially a shiny silver box. Underage eyes weren’t able to peer through its metal walls, which immediately set it apart from the other exhibits with their open, inviting architecture.

	Instead of being showered with bills, the dancers pushed Napster dollars into the mitts of the mesmerized males.

To promote its Purrlesque Lounge, Napster positioned a small, free-standing placard outside the booth announcing show times. The dancers also promoted their appearance at the DigitalLife show during a pre-show guest spot on “The Howard Stern Show.” To further build buzz around the burlesque-themed presentation, a street team of five outside the exhibit hall distributed leaflets promoting the booth and offering free, 30-day trials of Napster. Within minutes of the show’s opening, visitors started lining up behind a red velvet rope for waits one hour and longer just to get inside the booth.

Napster carded all attendees to make sure they were 18 or over, before allowing them in two at a time every five minutes, until the booth reached its maximum capacity of about 40 people. Before the half-hour shows started every 90 minutes, the eager visitors slacked on lounge furniture; gazed at 5-foot-high black-and-white photos of models wearing MP3 players (and little else); checked out Napster’s services on any of nine laptops set on bar tables; and drank up the audio caffeine of a DJ spinning hits from the company’s catalog and occasionally repeating “Never pay a buck a track again” like a mantra. But all that was just foreplay.

Right before each show started, Napster personnel hurried around the booth clicking shut the laptops while the audience quickly filled the available seating around a runway stage as if playing musical chairs. Then, one at a time, the three dancers burst through a heavy maroon curtain onto the runway stage. Wearing costumes — for a while, anyway — such as a cowboy getup with knee-high white leather boots and a feather boa with stilettos, the gyrating models shook their body parts like a 6.0 earthquake. Shedding most of their clothes to excerpts of 10 songs such as “Money Maker” and “Lips of an Angel” they had picked from Napster’s vast inventory, the hotties thrashed for the enthralled audience sitting inches away, staring like 16-year-olds who’d suddenly woken up in the Playboy mansion.

The in-booth striptease stayed true to the British videos that inspired it. Instead of being showered with bills, the dancers pushed Napster dollars into the mitts of the mesmerized males, connecting the sex to the service in a tactile — and still legal — way. Emblazoned on each bill was the ubiquitous slogan, “Never pay a buck a track again,” along with an offer for three months of unlimited music downloads, as well as a free MP3 player.

While the receptive crowd inside ate up the experience, the lines outside Napster’s Purrlesque Lounge often remained 40 to 50 deep until the show floor closed. Word of what went on inside the booth spread like harassment suits at a Hooters franchise. “If we had known it would work this well,” Farina says, “we would have built a larger booth.”

Save the Lap Dance for Me

The attendees weren’t the only ones left entranced. “They really needed to do something original to drive home their message and get noticed,” said one Sizzle Awards judge. “This is original. In fact, I’d say it’s the most innovative and perhaps most cutting-edge entry we’ve seen.”

While other companies’ presentations may have droned on, for example, about the exciting new backup options in Windows Vista, Napster used the joy of sex to draw enormous crowds and bring home the Hippest Booth award from PC Magazine on a budget smaller than the dancers’ bikini briefs.

Helped by contagious word of mouth and the promotion on Stern’s radio show (and therefore avoiding other potentially costly marketing efforts), Napster nearly doubled its attendance goal for the four-day show. Hoping for a total of 500 visitors a day, Napster soon realized 1,000 were streaming through its booth daily, topping out at more than 4,000 for the run of the show. And with results like that, it’s easy to understand how Napster can feel so good about being so b-b-b-b-b-bad to the bone. e