In the age of “stan culture”, few acts have fans quite as, let’s say, enthusiastic as Harry Styles. Every gesture and utterance is combed for meaning and importance. So, when you have a fanbase that reads meaning into everything, why not add meaning into everything?
Hence the complex and convoluted build up to the release of ‘Adore You’, the first single from Styles’s second album, Fine Line. We are used to acts hiding Easter eggs around the internet and using platforms like Landmrk for real-world and virtual scavenger hunts. We have also seen acts, like Years & Years (for the Palo Santo album campaign in 2018) and Boards Of Canada (for 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest), leave breadcrumbs and cryptic clues before anything has even been announced. But we have not seen anything quite on the level of this Harry Styles campaign.
Manos Xanthogeorgis, SVP of digital marketing & media at Columbia Records, spoke to Billboard in December about just how huge and complex an undertaking it all was. It involved peppering a convoluted series of clues through videos, dusty corners of the internet and social media while also responding in real time to the Styles fanbase’s ability to crack clues (or not) and amending the rest of the campaign on the hoof as a result, giving them nudges in the right direction when required and also changing script based on where the fans were taking it.
At the heart of it was a fictional island called Eroda (“Adore” backwards) that had a mysterious backstory and its own curious tourist website that claimed there was “no land quite like it”. The more you dug into it and the more you found out about the attractions and read the testimonials, the denser and more disquieting it got. This curious and unknowable island had a definite Wicker Man feel to it and the attention to detail – with clues and allusions throughout – was so rich that the promoted ads purporting to be from the Eroda Tourism Board were enough to make Black Mirror fans, themselves no strangers to complex deconstructions, think it was a teaser for a new series while gaming fans thought it was the set up to a new online game.
Harry Styles fans went deep on trying to unlock the clues and make connections that required dense layers of esoteric knowledge about Styles and deep back references to things he had posted or talked about in the past.
It became an international group effort, with fans pooling resources and posting leads as they discovered them. This was going on for months, everyone going deeper down the rabbit holes – and even digging some fresh ones themselves as the campaign morphed into new shapes. “They’re incredibly smart, they’re brilliant the way they pieced it all together,” said Xanthogeorgis of the fans and how they responded. “In this day and age when there is so much out there getting people to pay attention to one thing is really satisfying.”
When all the clues were finally laid out together, it was akin to the ending of The Usual Suspects, leaving you boggling at the precision involved in scripting it, adapting it on the hoof and finally pulling it all together.
It really was a remarkable piece of marketing that shows just how creative things can get. Of course, this only works when you have a massive budget and a highly engaged audience who relish knowing everything about an act and will read enormous symbolism into everything they do. Even so, as a showcase for ambition in marketing, this will take some beating.
