Three years since the release of his last album, legendary mix master and experimental hip-hop collaborator DJ Shadow began the promotion for his latest double-album, Our Pathetic Age. The themes of the album encompass the new era of social media and an interpretation of this fascinating obsession that exists with screens and the digital world.
In July 2019, Fame House archived all previous DJ Shadow posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram before DJ Shadow posted to social media with a stripped-down version of the new single artwork with cryptic copy and a link to sign up for his email list.
The day before the release, we sent out an email to DJ Shadow’s 96k subscribers to give them the first taste of the new music. The email drove subscribers to listen to 30 seconds of the new song, ‘Rocket Fuel’ featuring De La Soul, on YouTube.
Throughout the rest of the campaign, as recommended by Fame House, DJ Shadow gave his email subscribers the first taste of new music, special announcements and exclusive stories before press outlets or social media followers.
An exclusive piece of this campaign has been DJ Shadow’s personally written stories about the conception of the songs. These stories include tidbits about discovering new samples, working with collaborators and inner learnings about the decisions that brought him to put these tracks on the new album.
Before the album was announced, Fame House recommended a way to tease the announcement to his social media fan-bases by stripping down the three colourways of the album artwork into colour blocks with the copy, “You have a new message. September 20, 2019” indicating that something was about to happen on that date.
The announcement day incorporated a video designed and edited by Fame House utilising the album artwork. It also included a new song, ‘Rosie’ with a hypnotic, looping visualiser edited by Fame House that lived on the label’s YouTube channel. Fame House created various versions of the visualiser and the elements of the album artwork for all of the 23 tracks on the album.
Outlets including The Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Stereogum, BBC and other major press outlets shared the creative work made by Fame House alongside articles about the new music.
Fame House also created a new landing page, ourpatheticage.com that re-directed to the Linkfire that hosted the latest release along with a link at the top to the online shop where fans could pre-order physical music and album related apparel. The landing page continued to exist throughout the duration of the campaign, re-directing to the latest priority.
Fame House created a video using the inner-gatefold artwork of the physical vinyl which featured the tracklist. The video starts out with the image horizontal on a vertical screen, hosted on Instagram Stories, then includes a message that says, “Please rotate your phone” so people are prompted to turn their phone 90°. This plays into the theme of the album where something so small may seem larger to people accustomed to digital technology doing all the work for them.
The unique creative elements incorporated in this campaign introduced a new era for DJ Shadow in his musical career. Overall the campaign as of 10/18/19 has received over 1.3m impressions and earned over 3,200 new emails
While the standard KPIs for any marketing campaign may include acquisition, engagement, impressions, conversions etc. the priority here was the music. We wanted to share these tracks and tell stories in unique and interesting ways with DJ Shadow’s legacy fans as well as new fans who may be hearing his music for the first time.
