A classical artist can and should make use of the same tactics as pop acts. A well-executed and well-structured campaign, playing with new methods of reaching potentially new audiences.
Note, the text that follows was provided by the team behind the campaign.
Company
Decca Records
Team members involved
David Heath – senior digital marketing manager
Gavin Bayliss – senior marketing manager
Emily Waller – digital marketing manager
Benedict Curran – streaming manager
Jess Simmonds – product manager
Batuhan Bozkurt – developer
Campaign breakdown
Budget: £2k – £5k
Audience demographic: 55% female / 45% male, age 18-34, UK, Italy and US
Overview of campaign
Einaudi’s music is ubiquitous and it always seems to connect with such a broad demographic – so we wanted to do something extraordinary to reveal his new album, Elements. When we talked to him about his inspirations, he cited influences from artists, musicians, scientists and even code breakers, which gave us a great starting point and got us thinking.
A few months earlier I’d seen a site called Touch Pianist and, after hearing what Ludovico had to say about his music, I realised Touch Pianist gave us the chance to announce the album and lead single without giving anyone the actual music.
So the announcement was like, “’Night’ is the new single from Ludovico Einaudi, but we’re not telling you how it sounds until tomorrow; you have to go to our website and work it out for yourself!” That was a fun thing to surprise people with. Letting fans explore and interact with a piece of music for themselves seemed like a nice way to do it that I don’t think has been done before.
We gave people 24 hours to mess with it for themselves before we give them the music video so they could hear what it really sounded like. The idea got lots of attention, including from Spotify, and shortly after the album release we launched a worldwide homepage takeover with the player inside it (the first time you could play music yourself from within Spotify) which we delivered in six languages.
We also hid coordinates disguised as Morse code within video content which pinpointed a river and bridge near to Ludovico’s birth place in Google Maps. Typing the location into the conspicuous-looking password box on the website revealed a phone number which you could call to hear Ludovico’s answerphone message (and you could leave your own message).
There have been a lot of pieces to this campaign, but the entire team has worked hard to communicate them all in a logical and exciting way and it’s been brilliant watching people engage with the ideas we’ve put together.
Results and key learnings
The dedicated landing page welcomed over 8k unique visitors on the announcement date, and it was great to see people talking about the idea over Twitter and sharing the link.
One metric I was interested in from the start was dwell time. Google Analytics reported an average session duration of just over two minutes per user, which is fantastic.
It was important to me that the site had a lifespan outside of the announcement date. Because we were holding back the piece of music until the day after the announcement, we saw a large percentage of return visitors who logged back on to give the game another shot once they were familiar with the rhythm.
Across the announcement weekend, approximately 41% of visitors who logged on to the site did so with a mobile device.
Since the announcement date, traffic to the site has lowered but remains consistent, and we’re still seeing people discover it for the first time; something we’re keen to encourage as we message the link with the rest of our content reveals going into next year.
Links and extra info
http://einaudielements.com
http://tinyurl.com/q6pzzau
http://tinyurl.com/h9flgl2
http://www.earslap.com
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