SL, the 19-year-old boy originating from Croydon in a balaclava, has always been a mysterious and elusive character where less is more. We came out of the blocks with ‘Bad Luck’ from his EP Selhurst SE25, co-produced by Kenny Beats earlier this year. ‘Tropical’ by SL was the unofficial Fortnite soundtrack, racking up over 3m+ views on Fortnite UGC on YouTube alongside professional Fortnite player Kyle Jackson, also known as Mongraal (3.5m YouTube subscribers) being such a huge fan.

S’s pre-existing presence within this community and the data we were reading on his audience proved there was a strong affiliation with gaming. This inspired the idea of SL exploring Twitch and therefore led to us premiering the single ‘Bad Luck’ on Kenny Beats’ Twitch channel, and for Twitch to be the place where S spoke on camera for the first time to his fans. Twitch gave this moment global homepage promotion and a #2 placement on the music streaming page. We saw the viewers jump over 10k when S joined the stream.

Leading into the release of the following single, ‘Little Bird’, we launched the official artist website with a cryptic looping livestream featuring various footage relating to the EP concept as well as video footage, edited and produced as SL’s POV with a clear outline of his balaclava. The idea was to tease the video featuring SL, a Tesla and sheep with footage from Elon Musk’s Tesla keynote and the streets of Croydon with the aim to confuse and create anticipation. This content was a trailer for what was to come, announced with a cinematic clip on Instagram, and streamed fully on SL’s website on loop for hours. That content has been engaged with over 87k times and overall 100k impressions.

On the lead into the release of the Different Dude mixtape, SL travelled to a local school in Croydon to hand out #SLBackToSchool backpacks with SL-branded stationery and to speak with the school kids, give them advice and connect with the youth. On the release of the mixtape, we launched a QR outdoor activation whereby we posted up S’s iconic silhouette with a QR code in four key locations in London for fans to scan. Once discovered and scanned, they were presented with a personal message from SL and a chance to win a personalised rucksack if they followed him on Spotify. The footfall of this activation amounted to the thousands and we saw SL’s Spotify Followers jump over 10k during this period. We also launched both Snapchat and Instagram AR filters that put fans into S’s balaclava.

This year’s digital highlights have been driven by the fans and S’s authenticity. Minimal but impactful activations continue to grow his audience and add to his story, backed up with high-quality creative and the hard work from him and the team – but always staying true to who he is.