Always Ascending followed a few years’ hiatus for the band. They’d released Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action in August 2013 and toured it globally, had a shift in line-up and spent a year writing and demoing their new music before recording in Paris with producer Phillipe Zdar.
This break between albums had seen the major shift in consumption trends toward streaming and a multi-territory Ralph Lauren sync on ‘Take Me Out’ was driving very healthy catalogue engagement as we prepared for the campaign. With multiple key markets to court, ideas with global scale were crucial to the set-up of Always Ascending.
On the day of the album announcement, the band Facebook live streamed a tiny gig from Paris, which coupled with the album news saw full penetration of their 1.9m Facebook fans across 24 hours.
We revived the Franz Ferdinand Fan Club – once run by post and email – to beef up our Spotify pre-save offering, incentivising the band’s fanbase to follow them on Spotify and save the album with a gated monthly web experience featuring exclusive videos, lyric reveals and the opportunity to interact directly with the band. This attracted north of 4k subscribers, who were added to the band’s mailing list post-release.
The band enlisted friend and director Diane Martel to produce an Apple Music exclusive music video for single ‘Feel The Love Go’ and captured social content for Apple’s channels – a ‘Glasouija Board’ video Q&A. A Side By Side audio commentary piece for Alexa and a First & Last Time video interview gave Amazon users a unique perspective on the new material. Superfan events with Spotify and Deezer furthered fans’ opportunities to directly connect with the band.
We started the campaign with 3m Spotify monthly listeners, launched the album with 4.3m and 10 months post-release have maintained at 4.2m. Based on their Spotify toplist, we created The Sound of Franz Ferdinand catalogue playlist and via on- platform advertising and social shares have driven its follower count to 22k.
Close collaboration with the band’s social media agency GH05T ensured the right mix of social content intersected key time zones across the span of the campaign. Live footage and throwbacks were balanced with fresh personal video content from the band announcing their tours and introducing new band members Julian and Dino, while a series of vignettes captured in the studio wove through the set up period to further share the album’s narrative.
The band were strong with numbers on Facebook (1.9m), but fairly new to Instagram, and we’ve close to trebled their followers here across the campaign – from 60k on announce in October 2017 to 115k on release in February 2018 and 160k today. Equally their Vevo subscribers have more than doubled during the campaign and their Twitter has grown by over 30%. It’s just been Facebook that’s proven tougher to drive scale of growth, which is relatable for many artists. Using unique merchandise packs as prizes, we more than doubled the band’s mailing list size across the campaign with ‘sign up to win’ competitions – a hugely successful mechanic when working with a large social fanbase.
There’s never a shortage of ideas when it comes to working with Franz. With DSP partnership opportunities and social innovations stronger than ever, and a band who are a label’s dream – creative, deeply involved, hard-working – 2018 proved an especially fun and fruitful time to take the band to market globally.
