Einaudi’s music is ubiquitous and it always seems to connect with such a broad demographic – so we wanted to do something extraordinary to reveal his new album, Elements. When we talked to him about his inspirations, he cited influences from artists, musicians, scientists and even code breakers, which gave us a great starting point and got us thinking. A few months earlier I’d seen a site called Touch Pianist and, after hearing what Ludovico had to say about his music, I realised Touch Pianist gave us the chance to announce the album and lead single without giving anyone the actual music. So the announcement was like, “’Night’ is the new single from Ludovico Einaudi, but we’re not telling you how it sounds until tomorrow; you have to go to our website and work it out for yourself!” That was a fun thing to surprise people with.

Letting fans explore and interact with a piece of music for themselves seemed like a nice way to do it that I don’t think has been done before. We gave people 24 hours to mess with it for themselves before we give them the music video so they could hear what it really sounded like. The idea got lots of attention, including from Spotify, and shortly after the album release we launched a worldwide homepage takeover with the player inside it (the first time you could play music yourself from within Spotify) which we delivered in six languages. We also hid coordinates disguised as Morse code within video content which pinpointed a river and bridge near to Ludovico’s birth place in Google Maps. Typing the location into the conspicuous-looking password box on the website revealed a phone number which you could call to hear Ludovico’s answerphone message (and you could leave your own message).

There have been a lot of pieces to this campaign, but the entire team has worked hard to communicate them all in a logical and exciting way and it’s been brilliant watching people engage with the ideas we’ve put together.