Rampant frontline promotion and studious catalogue enrichment are not natural bedfellows. The relationship is often binary and at times of breathless frontline activity, catalogue strategy often has to wait its turn.
Aiming to disrupt this conventional norm, we set out to prove catalogue can fundamentally enhance every aspect of any wider plan. Above all our objective was to drive incremental streaming consumption and lasting commercial value.
Our field of play was an eight-month window bookended by the Farewell Yellow Brick Road world tour kicking off in September 2018 and the Rocketman biopic in May 2019. YouTube was agreed as the primary focus, steered by Elton’s glittering video archive.
Our heady mission involved researching, sourcing, supplying and communicating live performances which had never before reached Elton’s official channels. We committed to a new release every week for the entire period, all brought together under the #EltonLive campaign banner.
Programming was designed to harmonise with “real world”’ moments, ensuring catalogue drops were in lockstep with anniversaries, regional shows and the all-important film. This created powerful relevance for the new content and captured distinct audiences as they became more engaged with Elton throughout the year.
Label, artist and broadcast archives were scoured to find historical performances from specific locations to match the first stretch of Elton’s world tour. In total we delivered 35 live performance videos using iconic footage captured throughout the last 50 years of Elton’s career.
Rare early career moments were unearthed alongside legendary shows such as Dodger Stadium in 1975, releasing the latter to coincide with the worldwide promotion of Rocketman and Taron Egerton channelling that unforgettable performance in head-to-toe baseball gear.
Each piece of archive footage was painstakingly transferred and restored to industry gold-standard specs so that fans were able to view historic performances from Elton’s career in HD/4K for the very first time.
Deep optimisation was achieved via branded thumbnails, smart keywords and overhauled descriptions linking to wider artist activity alongside wider digital messaging via eCRM and channel optimised cut downs. The intensity of this delivery was a real challenge, but every time we leaned-in with new catalogue content we were rewarded with deep and lasting engagement from fans.
This campaign marked a dramatic step change for Elton’s catalogue consumption and overall YouTube channel health. Over and above the 30m views added to date from the 35 new videos, we employed two different models to track uplifts in views, watch time and subscriber numbers.
First, we assessed the size of that step change by comparing views, watch time and subscribers in the eight-month campaign period (October 2018 to May 2019) versus the prior eight months (February 2018 to September 2018). Significant increases were seen across all three, as views (+44%), minutes (+53%) and net subscribers (56%) were all heavily improved.
Key for us was also understanding the long-term impact. To that end, we analysed the three months before the campaign started (July 2018 to September 2018) and three months after it concluded (June 2019 to August 2019). Both periods saw no catalogue uploads and are comparable in terms of wider influences or activity.
It turns out the lasting effect of our activity was even more pronounced, with views (+119%), minutes (+111%) and net subscribers (+106%) experiencing remarkable growth. Our decision to choose a cohesive approach demonstrates how catalogue can be exploited for universal benefit and has the power to double long-term commercial returns in this space.
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