Traffic Jam at Chris Daughtry Concert

The exhilaration of waiting for a star in the making to arrive was almost overwhelming. Girls in trendy short skirt and short pants arrived in droves with their funky boyfriends in tow. The whole event was made to look exactly like a street party with human entering the street through a huge car wash (more like human wash since humans walked through them) followed by a bus stop complete with a bus stop signages being the only place with seats in the whole street party. They do not call it street party for nothing. Booths with food and drinks was in an array before the clubbers arrived at the front of the stage where a big tent for VIPs was set up to allow VIPs to grace the occasion complemented with food and drinks.


There was lots of room for standing and when I found a place, I actually felt how breezy the place was. Singapore being Singapore placed large coolers around the standing area to avoid poor standing souls like us from sweating too much hence creating a stench in the area. I like it so I stood there patiently waiting for the runner up of American Idol 2, beaten by the sacharrine sweet Carrie Underwood to appear.


A few hours later, approximately 9.30pm, when the stage lights was dimmed and the soft beats of music start turning louder and when the drums were beaten, all hell broke lose and the crowd screamed and shrieked to their heart's content. The wait is finally over and the bald Chris Daughtry appeared on stage dressed in a casual checked shirt and jeans, rocking to the tunes from his recent album. Famous for his hiht song "Over You", he sang his songs to the loud hums from the audience who were crazy to his charm and style. He also sang a few of his new songs which were responded favorably by the crowd.

The street party called Traffic Jam (even though there was none on a blocked-off road) was sponsored by Singtel, Sony Ericsson, Stuff magazine and Red Bull. The only way to get the free tickets is by winning them from one of the sponsors or by looking pretty enough to be one of the celebrities or radio DJ in Singapore. The main sponsor Sony Ericsson could be commended for doing a good job in setting up such fantastic props along Armenian Street which is condoned off for the event. The branding was quite good with a subdomain called sonyericsson.com/trafficjam being created to drive traffic into their website to find out more about the latest walkman phones and promotions. Since Sony Ericsson is coming up with so many models of walkman phones where the user can shake their phone to change the selection of music, it does make sense for Sony Ericsson to sponsor a mini concert like this.

What they should have done better is they could have used this event as a platform or avenue to create bigger awareness to their Walkman phones. Just like how Nokia promoted the use of their latest phone models to take videos and mms of the New Years event they sponsored where the best videos and photos stand a chance to win more Nokia phones, SE could have done something along those lines. I was even spying to see if anyone was using SonyEricsson's phone to take video of the concert but everywhere I only see Nokia phones being used from N82 to N95 to Nokia Communicator. Finally I found someone using a SE phone to record the concert and found the quality commendable.

They could even organize a sing- a Chris Daughtry song using SE Walkman phone recorded and upload to the website to win free tickets to the concert. They can also offer a post-concert contest like uploading of photos and videos of the events taken using a SE phone and send the photos via mms to the website. This will increase the use of GPRS data which benefits Singtel as well. This could also encourage the purchase of better models of Sony Ericsson for the die-hard fans to win the contests.

Well, I was unable to catch the ending of the show as I had to rush off somewhere but the exhilaration of hearing him sing live did not rub off till much later. With Sony Ercisson sponsoring this concert all over the world creating a good music branding strategy for themselves, I am left wondering if they will be a phone sponsor for the upcoming Beijing Olympics 2008 and how an international sports event will benefit handset manufacturers.