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chrisgertz@gmail.com
BEATS BY DRE
Role
Global Brand Marketing Manager scaling Beats through Apple's $3.2B acquisition
Scope
Creative campaign marketing and international brand management
Impact
64% market share of the premium headphone market in 2 years, 3x sales to #1 wireless earphone in North America, billions of impressions through a multiple award-winning campaign, significant global brand presence
Recognition
Game Before The Game: 3 Cannes Lions (Gold for Branded Content, Silver for Adapted Music, and Silver for Online Non-Fiction), multiple Clio Awards (including Gold in Clio Music and Bronze/Silver recognitions), and a Bronze Pencil at The One Show.
#StraightOutta: 7 Cannes Lions, Shorty Awards Finalist/Honoree recognition for cross-platform social engagement, and The One Show / ADC Awards merited structural design and promotional recognitions.
The Game Starts Here: Cannes Lions shortlist, Bronze Pencil at The One Show, and won Silver in Branded Content for the Lovie Awards
Challenge: When I joined Beats, the brand was a cultural force in the US but nearly unknown everywhere else. As the company's first international marketing hire, I was tasked with a fun challenge: take the brand global, fast, while localizing it efficiently and without watering down the brand.
Idea: Build it market by market, localizing the campaigns, then hardwire the overall brand consistency in. I helped stand up a new global marketing and operations team and pushed Beats into EMEA, LATAM, and APAC, holding the voice, positioning, and creative direction tight across all of it. I was then promoted to Global Brand Marketing Manager, the youngest on the team, helping run multimillion-dollar campaigns including Game Before the Game, #StraightOutta, Training Is Now Wireless, and The Game Starts Here.
Result: During my time at Beats, sales tripled, the brand took majority share of the premium headphone market, and it grew from a US name into a global one on the back of a string of award-winning, culture-first campaigns. A few years after I started, Beats sold to Apple for $3.2 billion, still its largest acquisition ever. (A few campaign-by-campaign breakdowns below.)
Every campaign started with the music
Sports and culture were the spotlight, but the music drove the storytelling. We scored the work with the hits of the moment, tracks whose lyrics that helped tell the underlying story of what you were watching, and they stuck: people still hear X Ambassadors' "Jungle" and picture Neymar in the tunnel and get goosebumps when LeBron comes back to his empty home gym, his church, when Hozier's vocals hit. This was one my favorite parts of these campaigns: the power of music telling an emotional story in advertising. It turns a great frame into a feeling, and it does it a little differently for everyone watching. Getting the perfect mix of artist, music, lyric, timing, product, and cultural moment was the part of the job I genuinely enjoyed the most.
Game Before The Game
The 2014 World Cup belonged to Nike and adidas, and Beats wasn't even a sponsor; FIFA had banned the brand from every venue. So instead of fighting for the game, we took the one key moment nobody owned: the pre-game. The five-minute film followed footballers like Neymar Jr through their pre-match rituals, cut to X Ambassadors' "Jungle," a track so fused to the film it became the song's official video. It went viral on day one and racked up more than 26 million YouTube views, 1.5 billion global impressions, and a triple-digit sales lift during the tournament, all while out-marketing the sponsors who paid for the privilege. I was one of the key leads on the brand side, from talent to music to creative direction and asset management to rollout across nine countries and five languages. Created with our longtime agency partner, R/GA.
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Straight Outta ______
When the Straight Outta Compton biopic landed (the origin story of N.W.A., and of Beats co-founder Dr. Dre), we turned a film launch into a full-blown cultural moment. The idea was almost stupidly simple: a meme generator that let anyone "rep their city" by finishing the line "Straight Outta ___." It became the first campaign ever to trend #1 simultaneously on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, drove 8.7 million pieces of user-generated content, reached 1.2 billion people, and pulled copycats from Snickers to the White House before taking home 7 Cannes Lions. Rooting a global meme in hip-hop's DNA is exactly the music-first cultural instinct Beats was built on. Media, creative, and analytics in partnership with PMG.
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Training Is Now Wireless
Powerbeats2 Wireless was Beats' first-ever wireless earphone, built for athletes, and it launched right as Apple was acquiring the brand. "Training Is Now Wireless" put it exactly where it belonged, on the world's best athletes from a variety of sports, mid-training, with LeBron James, Serena Williams, Zou Shiming, and Mario Götze. The centerpiece was LeBron's "Re-established" film, shot as he returned home to Cleveland: following him training in a bare gym, intercut with flashbacks to his childhood home and community that raised him, building into something far bigger than a product ad (and a lot more emotional). The music carries it, swelling under the flashbacks until the whole thing lands like a homecoming. As Brand Marketing Manager for the in-ears, I helped lead the effort, which drove a 400% sales uplift and pushed Powerbeats to the #1 wireless earphone in North America at 62k+ units aweek.
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The Game Starts Here
The last campaign I worked on before leaving Beats, launched a month before I walked out the door, took the "pre-game" idea we'd built for football and carried it into the Rugby World Cup. "The Game Starts Here" followed three national captains - England's Chris Robshaw, New Zealand's Richie McCaw, and France's Wesley Fofana - through the pressure, doubt, and preparation that happens long before kickoff. What made it sing was the music: instead of a hit single, each film was scored to a rousing national anthem, including a haka written exclusively for Beats and a stirring rendition of "Jerusalem." It was also a showcase for the whole wireless family, Studio Wireless, Solo2 Wireless, and Powerbeats2 Wireless, which by then was the thread running through all of our work. Again created with our longtime agency partner, R/GA.
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