Gabrielle Aplin secured the coveted John Lewis Christmas ad soundtrack (2012) with her cover of ‘The Power Of Love’. As a result of its success, we pushed the release plans of her own material back by a few months. Working towards the album coming out in May, we needed to find a way to reignite that initial interest and get people to fall in love with her in her own right.
Gabrielle already had a sizeable YouTube following – she had 8m official content plays on YouTube and 44,000 subscribers with 10,000+ daily plays. We chose YouTube as the key platform digitally to push the English Rain release and looked at a creative way for her to engage with her fanbase and connect with a wider prospective audience. We were the first advertiser on YouTube to make use of the ability to segment the audience by their relationship with the content, rather than by demographics or keyword targeting. We separated ‘Hot Leads’ (fans who had liked or shared Gabrielle’s videos or who had watched less-viewed content) from ‘Warm Leads’ (people who had only watched one video or entry level material like covers of other artists). We then retargeted them with a sequence of specially developed video content in YouTube instream. To ‘Hot Leads’, we supplied an 18-minute sampler of the album, an unreleased album track and an exclusive acoustic version of her biggest single, followed by a personalised film message from Gabrielle. ‘Warm Leads’ received the entry-level content of official videos and a cover version of the song ‘Dreams’ with Bastille.
Alongside the YouTube campaign we engaged and explored all other platforms.
• Dedicated tools were built for Panic Cord http://www.gabrielleaplin.co.uk/paniccord/ & English Rain: http://www.gabrielleaplin.co.uk/englishrain/.
• Socials were actively maintained daily by Gabrielle herself, interacting with fans across each network.
• The campaign included a promotion around Gabrielle’s headline tour. We launched an optimised platform that encouraged fans to upload songs and pick a tour date that they would like to support on Gabrielle’s tour. Fans and friends were able to use Facebook and Twitter to promote the competition and various performances. Gabrielle picked the winners herself and these winning fans won the opportunity to perform on her tour at each respective live date. Sessions were performed for the iTunes Festival, Spotify, Shazam and others and was supported across all of her channels.
Results:
The album entered the chart at #2 with sales to date topping 120k with a healthy digital share of over 50%.
YouTube plays jumped from 8m to over 40m official content plays and saw subscribers increase from just 44k to an impressive 267k. Gabrielle signed with 29k Facebook fans and 11k Twitter fans.
Facebook climbed 635% to 213k and Twitter from 1.2k% to 137k. In just one month on the tour support mechanic, we received over 2k video entries and over 250k votes.
For the YouTube campaign, we were rewarded with engagement rates, which surpassed anything we had ever seen.
• We drove 595k interactions with 15% of our audience watching the 18-minute album sampler in its entirety.
• Our audience took to Twitter in droves to tell their friends about how much they loved our advertising, taking photos of the pre-rolls and creating the hashtag #notskipping.
• The people who were exposed to our advertising went on to explore her channel – deepening their interest with 275k incremental views.
Key learnings:
• Confirmed the importance of a hypertargeted remarketing strategy across the label.
• YouTube as a platform proves that a longterm plan is as valuable as short bursts around releases.
• A long-term campaign is not just about singles; ours was a continual strategy of single/album/tour/international and is still in place and ongoing.
• A cohesive campaign that was informed by all areas of our marketing team, artist/manager, A&R, digital, marketing, creative, A/V, radio, online, print, live, TV, advertising, brands, sync and, of course, the fans.
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