2019 marked the 50th anniversary year of Led Zeppelin. To celebrate, we developed a campaign which, despite no new material or band involvement, engaged existing fans but, arguably more importantly, reached a brand new audience for the band through a number of influencers coupled with innovative marketing activations.
This was rolled out globally throughout the year and culminated in a new content series which further engaged the new listeners to the band, continuing their journey from passive non-listeners to active fans of the band.
We created an interactive microsite to boost the visibility and promote further catalogue exploration of Led Zeppelin for their 50th anniversary year. As one of the most visually iconic bands of all time, we centred this around their “brand” and letting fans become part of the legacy.
It allows fans to build a playlist using any track from the Led Zeppelin catalogue. It automatically populates their Spotify library with custom, personalised cover art to accompany the playlist and allows fans to share via social media. It uses fan selection data creatively, giving fans a personal insight, within the global demographic of Led Zeppelin fans.
Every user on the site was cookied to provide rich user preference data.
Our strategy was to exclude existing Led Zeppelin fans from all paid marketing of these playlists, instead focusing on a much younger, new audience consisting of fans of the influencer artists plus others from the genre.
To take the audience journey to the next level, we put together the Led Zeppelin History series: eight high-quality, one-to-two-minute animated pieces specifically designed for Instagram.
These were used as the destinations for new fans that were being retargeted after having interacted with or listened to the band for the first time during 2019.
As we moved through the year, we were able to create more buckets and retarget in a way which allowed us to continue the story for those already engaging at the same time as beginning the story for others.
• Listeners to the band under the age of 18 growing YoY at +21%
• 35% of listeners to the band in 2019 are new listeners and did not stream Led Zeppelin on Spotify in 2018
• 31% of new listeners are based in the US, with Latin America comprising over 17%
• Total Led Zeppelin streams are up 20% YoY On the playlists:
• The playlists all became the best performing (in terms of Led Zeppelin streams) non-Spotify-owned lists at point of launch
• Average streams per listener extremely high: listeners landed on them and stayed there consuming multiple tracks
• The tracks which were chosen by the influencers regularly became trending tracks
On the videos:
• 8.5m total video views: half organic and half targeted at the specific audience we had our sights on
• By a long way the two most engaged posts on the Led Zeppelin page are videos 1 and 2 which launched the Led Zeppelin History series and set the tone for the rest of the year
Project Budget
Demographics
