After a now famous 24-hour social media blackout to mark the start of a new campaign, The 1975 dropped the opening track from their fourth album, Notes On A Conditional Form, titled ‘The 1975’ – an instrumental piece accompanied by a rallying speech on the climate crisis by Greta Thunberg. This was accompanied by a lyric video (formatted to square) uploaded to the band’s YouTube channel. This moment also launched the 30-day countdown to ‘People’.

The band’s website lead the launch with a new creative including electric yellow and black side bar and logos, with the website content an internet stock video clip of natural environmental beauty which was updated every day. The responsive website allowed fans to move their mouse over the video and distort the image. Each day with a new video the distortion effect increased – reflecting the impact of human interaction with nature.

The new creative also rolled out across the full catalogue of The 1975 as Spotify Canvases – manually updated daily with the new video creative and distortion. The first time the band had ever used the Canvas format. These also rolled out across Instagram Stories, YouTube Stories (the first time the band had used this feature) and Twitter.

All traffic from the swipe up and website was directed to a bespoke Spotify pre-save and Apple pre-add landing page and mailing list sign-up.

Two days out from release, we opened the YouTube Premiere window for the official video for ‘People’. Using custom countdown thumbnails with the yellow design to echo the wider campaign and disguise the imagery of the video ahead of release. Matty from the band also joined the YouTube chat for the first time, causing fan hysteria. We also embraced TikTok, with the band account going live and the track was posted by the growing scene of influential alternative e-boys and e-girls. TikTok then used ‘People’ as the lead track for its #rocktober initiative – with the song as default on a global AR “crowd surfing” effect.

To sustain interest on the track we uploaded three music videos to YouTube for the campaign, with both the vertical video and the exclusive lyric video taken from the live show and the video screens dropping through September/October.

Our digital media plan then also reflected the countdown with yellow GIF banners running as YouTube bumpers and as display ads across the Guardian website programmatically for the five days into release to drive the critical mass to new audiences beyond the core fanbase.

A totally cross-platform and globalreaching campaign, pushing creative boundaries, taking risks and embracing new technology to reach and engage an ever-more dedicated fanbase for one of the most exciting bands in the world.