In the congested headphone and portable audio market, and building on what JBL had already started, the brand needed to carve out a cultural space and back it with a comms platform that could genuinely inspire its audience and speak to them with conviction.
Using our proprietary data, we mapped the key cultural tensions driving what JBL’s audience really wants. Gen-Z feels unheard and unrepresented, and has no appetite for brands marketing their own world back to them. They get spoken to, not with. Mainstream conversation rarely reflects them or their self-image. And 63% of them spend time every week in open virtual worlds, building avatars with skins, wraps and outfits to project exactly the identity they want.
NERDS rebooted JBL’s Orange Box platform into a refreshed podcast series, fusing the audience’s real passions in street, gaming and meta culture into a new virtual space for honest, unfiltered conversation, somewhere voices are heard without restriction. It gave JBL an ownable, defendable platform in mixed reality, and a credible way into web3, an environment of near-limitless self-expression that’s fast becoming second nature for Gen Z.
