Having taken a year out of the public domain prior to this album we had to ensure Ed’s return delivered maximum excitement and then continued this momentum through into the album. Below are some of the key online moments of the campaign:

Return to social media and Snap Lens Premiere

• Instead of “going dark”, we decided to “go blue” on the anniversary of his departure from social media. This was timed to the exact minute and sparked a lot of interest and speculation from both fans and media.

• The speculation continued with a cryptic and simple video of Ed on 1st January announcing new music was coming on Friday. The clip was kept short and utilised text rather than audio so fans could get the message without having to turn on audio in their feed.

• We continued the teasing by running six-second ads on YouTube to a slowly expanding group of fans, starting with the most engaged and broadening out to a wider audience. This was mirrored on his own socials with animated lyrics of both songs without audio and then short bursts of audio each with their own distinct avatar to tease that there may be more than one song coming.

• We then premiered 30 seconds of ‘Shape Of You’ via a global SnapChat Lens on the Thursday before the two songs dropped. We didn’t message this at all and had no call out on the Lens itself, which amplified the excitement fans had when they came across it.

Album release and album on YouTube

• We took the decision to upload all album tracks in full to YouTube – the audio would make it there in some form, so we wanted it to be presented in a way that we could control the messaging around. This was also a good way to reach the 23m+ subscribers he has on his channel.

• We had “go 20” posters up around Ed’s home county in Suffolk in reference to him getting ticked off by the local police for his reference to “driving at 90” lyric in ‘Castle On The Hill’ – this outdoor quickly generated a lot of social media conversation, making it onto Twitter’s Moments homepage.

• We took Ed into HMV with no prior announcement and allowed him to serve fans and his security guard – this gave us the perfect video on release day to promote his album being out and use in our advertising.

Re-energising ‘Perfect’

• We started warming up the demand for ‘Perfect’ by releasing its own lyric video on 22nd September.

• We then put out a short clip of Ed serenading one of his cats and asked fans to then use the #Puurfect tag to post clips of their fans doing it. Ed then liked several of these posts which helped strengthen the bond between his fans and the song.

• The Christmassy official video was launched the week after Halloween on the 9th November. This meant we got up just as the high-street retailers launched their Christmas campaign and strengthened the record’s Christmas pedigree.