Our objective for this campaign was to re-engage KT Tunstall’s online audience and create a retargetable pool of fans in advance of a planned new release. By engineering a moment around the artist’s much-loved catalogue ahead of new music, we hoped to appeal broadly to KT’s fanbase over a longer timescale than a traditional album campaign.
KT’s archives contain numerous live performances, many of which had never been available on digital platforms. Having observed surges in catalogue streaming around new releases, we proposed to collate a selection of tracks from previous BBC sessions to form a digital EP that we could then deliver to partners. In doing so, we hoped to grow levels listening and engagement in advance of KT’s new release. The EP’s tracks were eligible for Release Radar and other algorithmic playlists, providing a fulcrum into fan’s collections.
KT found exploring her archives to be deeply personal, flavouring the product with an emotional element that we were sure to convey in all digital and social communications. A demonstrated heartfelt connection to the product and a tracklist that resurfaced multiple well-loved moments from her career thus far provided a prime platform through which to re-engage KT’s fans long before the release of new music.
Reflecting our approach to longer-term catalogue marketing, we were keen to reimagine the scope of the pre-save page created for the EP. We made small alterations to this mechanic that enabled fans to opt-in to receive all future releases from KT automatically, without any need to pre-save again. This meant that we were already collecting saves for albums yet to be announced, alongside valuable retargeting and eCRM data to be used in those campaigns. With a full frontline release planned for later in 2018, this was a huge boon.
The delivery of the new EP also gave us an opportunity to refresh KT’s artist playlists on Spotify, providing a platform to deploy further social posts that might draw fans towards her streaming profiles. We also engaged with Apple to create a KT Tunstall Essentials playlist, as one hadn’t existed previously.
The warm-up campaign that focussed around the BBC Live Sessions EP saw a 40% increase in overall digital sales and streams of KT’s catalogue during the weeks leading up to the announcement of the new pre-order.
Across KT’s socials, we saw an increase in average engagement of just under 20% during the timespan of this campaign. Individual posts regarding the EP announcements, pre-save, playlist refresh and addition of Apple Music Essentials saw spikes in engagement of up to 300%
One of our most successful pre-save mechanics on a catalogue release, with around 25% conversion. All of the users that signed up were subsequently opted-in to receive future KT Tunstall releases once available.
20% increase in followers on KT’s KT Tunstall Best Of playlist, all in advance of a full release of new material in place for later in 2018.
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