Two Door Cinema Club released False Alarm, their fourth studio album, on 21st June. It was their first album since leaving Parlophone/Warner Music and the goal of the campaign was to re-establish the band and to grow their global impact. CELESTE GUINNESS (digital strategy and marketing manager, PIAS), SEAN SPREY (head of marketing at Prolifica Inc. and project manager for this album), STUART DAVIE (UK marketing manager, PIAS), ALISON LAMB (day-to-day management for the band and marketing for Prolifica Inc.) and ANNE MUELLER (international marketing manager, PIAS) talk us through the launch, explaining why a long teaser campaign was designed to carefully and steadily set everything up while reconnecting with fans, where real-world activations (interactive billboards, phone boxes, a hot air balloon) were designed as statement pieces at key moments in the campaign and how a “stolen” blimp grabbed the headlines.
1. The band leaves a major and goes independent / starting again from scratch
AL: The last Two Door Cinema Club album was called Gameshow and was released on Warner in October 2016. The band went back to their roots – back to being an independent band. After that we did a JV with PIAS.
SS: A lot of it was a fresh start. We controlled all their socials and their ad channels. We also had control of all their DSP profiles. We had to set up Google and Facebook advertising channels afresh.
We were setting re-targeting and rebuilding their digital marketing pools from scratch. That is something we did right at the very beginning of the campaign for the new album with the use of an interesting video teaser that a new album was coming – and we used that for data capture. We put quite a lot of money behind it to push it out and see what the fan reaction was.
It was similar to the set up to the Circa Waves campaign. We had to do that because we were starting afresh. We didn’t have any data pools to work from.
2. Teasers set everything up
SS: The lead-up time for this campaign was quite far upfront. That time was used to test the waters and see what the reaction would be. It wasn’t necessarily used as a teaser into the album; that came much later on.
CG: The first social teaser that went out to herald the start of the campaign was on 21st February. We had a series of portraits that were quite mysterious and they didn’t say anything [about the album]. The caption was just a crystal ball. Before that, the socials were more live show-focused. There wasn’t a huge amount of fan engagement and so we started drip-feeding out a couple of interesting portraits to make people ask, “What’s this about?”
SS: There was no confirmation an album was coming at this point. There had been some discussions in the previous year in some articles that they were working on some music, but there was nothing about an album. We released this video just before Christmas and it was a visually amazing piece that suggested that something was coming the following year. It said “TDCC 2019” on an alarm clock.
SD: There were alarm clocks going off, teasing the idea that the album was called False Alarm. That was even before the name was announced.
3. Setting out the visual aesthetic for the album and defining the creative concept
SS: The first big bit of marketing was an interactive billboard we had built near Shoreditch High Street station. It was an image of the band on a fire extinguisher.
The imagery for the album was in collaboration with an artist called Aleksandra Kingo. It was a very collaborative project between the band and her. They ended up coming up with this concept shoot, which was all shot in a day.
All of these pieces were hyper-realistic versions of the characters in the band themselves in these different set ups – like them with a fire extinguisher, them getting Whac-a-Moled, them getting blasted by a megaphone. These were all set up to be the press shots that we would drop throughout the whole campaign.
4. Billboards 2.0: from the interactive to the virtual
AL: Based around the image with the fire extinguisher, we thought about what we could do with it and we decided to create a real-life fire extinguisher. We went to Diabolical and they looked into the mechanics of how we could do it. They created a smoke machine that was attached to a big red button [that passersby could press so that smoke would appear to come out of it].
SS: We rented out an existing billboard space and built on top of it. We had that for a two-week period.
AL: There were a lot of gas canisters involved! SS: We had great interaction with the billboard and that was the first worldwide news piece that went out. We pushed out news about it across their socials, notably Instagram and Facebook. We posted little videos of it and also put up the coordinates [of where it was located]. At the same time that the London billboard went up, we launched static billboards internationally during that week.
AM: We had billboards up in Sydney, Berlin, Mexico City and Paris. They are the band’s key international markets. They are also strong streaming territories for them.
SS: We wanted to give it a global feel. That was a big point of the campaign.
AM: It was designed to make a statement to say that they were back. We wanted to keep it mysterious but at the same time also make a statement that they are a global act.
AL: There was a great reaction on socials. We were alerting fans in each city that it was their turn to go out and find the billboards and posters. Mexico had a huge reaction.
SS: We were dropping coordinates for each piece – and this was before any music had come out.
It was a long teaser [for the album]. After the initial week, we launched an app with Landmrk and set up interactive virtual billboards in hundreds of places. The whole point was to place them in areas that fans would be able to get to – that people would usually be able to reach. We had over 20,000 hits on the first day.
People had the app, they could see the hotspot, they’d go to the hotspot and then they’d see a virtual billboard. They could also enter a competition to win tickets and flights to a show and also see some other images and videos bespoke to that location.
We used the worldwide billboards, the interactive billboards and the Landmrk app to give a good global reach to all the fans all around the world. The shareability on Landmrk meant we had fans sharing their pictures all over the internet.
5. Fan-centric treasure hunts in the real world
SD: We were pushing Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer follows as well. We also tied it into real-world location in Brighton.
SS: On announcing [the single ‘Talk’ ] was the Hottest Record on Annie Mac [on BBC Radio 1] we took over a red phone box in Brighton. On the Landmrk app, it showed up the red phone box on that day and we pushed out a special post about it and revealed the coordinates.
There wasn’t much lead up. It was just a case of, “Here it is – get down there now.” Inside the phone box was a red phone and when you picked up the receiver it played a clip of the song. Also inside the phone box, there were free T-shirts and little postcards.
It was a proper reward for the super fans. We filmed it all and that was pushed out on their socials and related to Annie Mac [making it her Hottest Record]. It all connected into the flow of the marketing. That was the first time fans could hear any new music.
AM: In France, we put up some street posters and we set up a hotline for fans to call where they could hear snippets of the music as well as a message from the band. We used that to capture their numbers and in turn use that data for retargeting during the album release and when the singles came out.
After the Annie Mac play, we premiered the song at key radio stations across the globe at the same time. SS: There were about 10 premieres. As soon as the radio plays happened, the single appeared on all the DSPs on a timed release. That was the first initial hit and we were getting a huge reaction and massive engagement.
6. Sending a satellite into space for the album cover reveal
SS: For the second single, ‘Satellite’, we were thinking about what we could do. So we thought we’d send it into space ! No-one had seen the artwork yet and obviously the front cover is quite iconic. It was a big image for the campaign. This was the first reveal of the track list, the album and the second single. We got the cover made up and we stuck it on a weather balloon along with a camera and then we launched it on Facebook Live and we had the band doing a live commentary on film as it went up into orbit. The guys commentated over it and the fans were messaging in asking questions. As it was going up, there was a lot of interaction between them and the fans. That was the first reveal of the cover.
CG: Even the tabloid gossip pages were talking about it – which was a funny place to find Two Door Cinema Club.
AM: The album pre-order launched half an hour after that. CG: We were thinking of things to coordinate with the satellite, so we decided to do some AR lenses. We got a lens made that essentially built a 3D satellite in the colours of the campaign – red and blue – and it had pictures of the members of the band on each side of the satellite. You could press a button and launch it into space and it also played the track. We had that on Snapchat and we worked with Fanbytes on some influencer marketing. At the time, we were told that Instagram was going to be opening up its lens beta. We were really pushing for that, but then Instagram pushed it back and pushed it back. One of the challenges of this campaign has been keeping on top of where Instagram is at with rolling out lenses. We’re still getting there. They have slightly different parameters than Snapchat. They are a little bit more strict in terms of what they allow with text. AL: When the lens was made, Instagram Lens functionality was not live – so we only had it go up on Snapchat . We ran a strong influencer campaign with global shares across multiple markets. The Instagram Lens is going live in a few weeks.
7. D2C bundles and multiformatting the album
AL: We wanted to create some really great BEHIND THE CAMPAIGN TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB bundles for the fans that were based around the artwork with some really interesting T-shirts featuring items from the cover. We also had cassettes in three colours and vinyl in three colours. We additionally had a pre-order mechanic for access to tickets as there was a full UK tour announced around the same time as the album.
AM: Internationally we launched a few bundles at retail to incentivise sales of the album. We had a different colour format that was specific to international retail. We also made some Two Door Cinema Club badges and pins to give away. For different retailers in each market we had an exclusive bundle to offer to their customers.
SD: The one place to get all the formats was on the band’s webstore.
SS: Playing on the album title, we also made some nice red alarm clocks that were Two Door branded.
AM: We sent them out internationally to media, DSPs and retail partners.
AL: It all tied in with where the band was going to be visiting.
8. Continuing the real-world phone idea
AM: In France, we did a special exhibition where the French team created an old fashioned phone that they placed in the middle of Paris in a square. They teased out the coordinates on the band’s socials for the fans to go and find the phone. They could go there, pick up the receiver and they would hear a message from the band as well as some snippets from the album when they dialled different numbers. That was just for one day and the French team were there all day to capture footage of fans interacting with it. It really had lots of engagement on YouTube once we uploaded it to the band’s channel. They actually used that phone later on in the campaign in places like universities as we got closer to album release.
AL: We had it in Berlin the week before the album release. The band was doing a small European underplay tour at the time, so we had them in market ahead of the album release.
AM: That was around the main launch when we announced the album and we created a lot of excitement around it. The French team also launched a campaign with digital screens across Paris and in the regions where they premiered the ‘Satellite’ video.
9. Building into the album and re-imagining the in-store gig
SS: It felt at that point that there was good natural momentum. Everything that we had built up was feeling quite solid. It was more looking towards what we could do just before the album release. We curated an interesting retail plan which involved the band playing quite a big tour. It was like a mini UK tour, where they were playing 1,000-capacity venues, but we used it as a retail platform.
AL: We partnered with venues in certain cities. To get tickets, fans had to buy through the store we partnered with in each city.
SS: You had to buy the album to get a ticket. It was really successful. Because the band hadn’t played live in England that much for quite a long period, getting them to play small venues and getting fans to buy the record [for entry] was a no brainer. It was partnering up with local independent record shops and was a great collaboration.
SD: It was a great week-one activity to get the band out into the market.
10. The curious case of the “stolen” fire extinguisher blimp
SS: At the time that was going on, we made a big inflatable fire extinguisher blimp. It was huge – maybe nine meters long. But they wouldn’t let us fly it! At this time they put out a red alert saying that someone had stolen their giant blimp for their Glastonbury headline show [on The Other Stage]. Obviously, it hadn’t been stolen. We messaged this out and we were putting up fake eBay listings with some hidden messaging in it to show that it was fake. We put up a fake Reddit post saying you could buy the fire extinguisher for £100,000. We rented a truck and we stuck it on the back. We drove it around key landmarks in London [and the UK] and filmed it. We posted out and the tabloids jumped on it. Radio 1 news even ran a piece about how the band’s fire extinguisher had been stolen! Just before the Glastonbury show, we announced that we had found it.
SD: The day they played Glastonbury was the day we got our chart position. The album was out on the 21st of June and then they played on the 28th.
SS: That was a big moment going into the end of the campaign.
11. An international priority
AL: It didn’t actually feel like we had elongated the campaign too much. The press pickup worked to our advantage. There were so many talking points – what the album artwork looked like, what the band was doing, an amazing reaction to the music [and so on].
SS: One of the big missions was to reintroduce the band and to get people to know who they are. People might know Two Door Cinema Club but might not know who the guys are, so we put them on the album cover. It was all going after a strong international feel which I think we achieved with the campaign.
CG: One thing we pushed leading up to the album was the New York pre-save competition.
SS: It offered the chance for a fan to win tickets to New York to see the band play the Hammerstein Ballroom [on 13th September]. That covered hotels and flights, the biggest [D2C] bundles and the chance to meet the band.
CG: We got some really good results on that. There were more than 5,000 presaves in total – on Spotify , Apple and Deezer. The majority were on Spotify.
12. Glastonbury weather warnings and Sheffield earthquakes
SD: For Glastonbury, we took out digital screens at motorway service stations on the way down to Glastonbury and on the way back from it. Luckily the weather was amazing – but we put up weather alerts, warning people that there were going to be thunderstorms, hail and snow. And then the screen flipped and it said “False Alarm”. We booked the screens and then we had to deliver the content a few days before [so we knew what the weather was going to be like]. It was a fun thing to do for people heading down on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and then heading back on the Sunday and Monday. So we had different screens for traffic going in different directions.
CG: On 19th July, they played Tramlines in Sheffield. They were recorded as causing a mini earthquake . We were able to use that as a focus to point people back to the album.
SS: There were a few little street marketing things we did. We had clings made up with images from the album. They are environmentally friendly stickers and they attach using static. It just means that you’re not going to get charged for hitting up a public space with loads of stickers as they peel off. Because of the [album title] connection to general public warning signs, we put them around Tube stations. It was just another way of subliminally placing the band’s message around London.
AL: We made a seaside cutout board of the album cover [with holes out for people to put their faces in] and took it along to Banquet Records because they were doing two shows there.
SS: Loads of fans went through it and took photos to share on their socials.
13. Live and the international push
AM: We also did an international run before the UK in-store tour in the weeks leading up to album release in Europe, focusing on key cities there – notably Amsterdam, Berlin and Paris. We set up two small underplay launch showcases as part of PIAS Nights. We used those dates to get the top fans into the shows. There were only a few tickets and we set up strong partnerships with local retailers and radio stations just to get everyone involved.
The German team set up a treasure hunt around the venue. They used different elements of the album cover to make single posters and asked fans to find all the elements of the album artwork and then share it on their socials, tagging PIAS and the band and they could then BEHIND THE CAMPAIGN TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB win tickets to the show. It was a really nice localised idea.
SS: Lots of people interacted with it. It was like a treasure hunt around the city.
AM: We did major national TV performances in the Netherlands and France as well. They were the first TV performances on this record. They also did radio sessions in all those markets and they did a trip to New York where they played a rooftop showcase and held a Q&A with fans. Tallying up the impact
SS: It was a number 5 album. It was a tough week with Bruce Springsteen and Madonna [having been out the week before] and new albums from Will Young, Mark Ronson and The Raconteurs out on the same day.
CG: Since we started the campaign, we got 180,000 new Spotify followers, 61,000 new Instagram followers, 65,000 new YouTube subscribers and 160,000 new Bandsintown trackers. Currently on Spotify it is averaging out at 680 new followers daily and 5.5m monthly listeners. That was 1.5m more than at the start of the campaign.
