In October 2018, platinum-selling rapper, MadeinTYO released his major label debut album, Sincerely, Tokyo, on BMG.

Throughout the album campaign, Fame House, BMG, and MadeinTYO’s management at Indie-Pop launched an ongoing SMS campaign via the platform Digits to reward superfans at each stage of the release.

The campaign was first launched prior to the release of MadeinTYO’s ‘Outstanding’ music video via Instagram Stories. A story on MadeinTYO’s page went live with a cryptic screenshot from the video featuring the phone number (470) 205-9645 and a prompt to “text me”.

Once fans texted the number, they received an automated text from Tokyo stating: “Yo it’s MadeinTYO. this is an autotext to let you know I got your message, everything else will be from me. Make sure you click the link and add yourself to my contacts so I can respond to you”

After launching the phone number, fans were mass-texted at strategic points throughout the campaign, beginning with the release of the ‘Outstanding’ video.

Next, the SMS list was leveraged in conjunction with Tokyo’s performance at iHeartRadio headquarters. Fans in the NYC area were encouraged on Tokyo’s social channels to text “iheart” to the Digits number –and five fans were randomly selected to win a pair of tickets to the event.

Finally, the Digits list was activated one last time around the release of the album to offer them a personal thank you for their support of Tokyo. Overall the campaign was successful in growing awareness for the album, delivering promotional content and updates directly to MadeinTYO’s biggest fans, as well as gathering contact information from his target audience.

The campaign successfully raised awareness for the album in a unique way. MadeinTYO was able to interact directly with his core fans during album rollout as well as leverage the platform’s SMS marketing capabilities increasing streams and video views for the album.