For The Cribs’ seventh studio album, 24-7 Rock Star Shit, we were tasked with driving pre-orders within a window of only two-and-a-half weeks. This was a record that was very much for the fans.
The band recorded the album in a five-day session with producer Steve Albini (Nirvana, PJ Harvey etc.) that was originally intended as a session for an EP. In advance of social hype being built, we added remarketing pixels to The Cribs website, D2C store, YouTube, Vevo (via their new CMS tool) and converted their Instagram account to an Instagram Business Profile so we could retarget fans who engaged on the platform. We knew the setup of this was crucial as we had such a limited period to capture fans’ attention.
In an effort to make the news of an impending announcement more obvious, our in-house design team built a website featuring a clock that counted down to what would be the album announcement. During this time, stencils and posters featuring the album’s title (but had no mention of The Cribs) were placed throughout London and shared via the band’s socials using the domain 247rockstarshit.com, which redirected to the clock on the band’s website. Doing this allowed us to grow pools of highly engaged fans that could then be retargeted over the coming weeks. During the short pre-order period leading into release week, over 8,000 website visitors were cookied (with separate audience for D2C).
On release week the website was flipped to a layout that Nick Scott had designed which was built by Airene Resurreccion from our in-house design team. The site showcased various retail options linking through to the band’s D2C store (provided by Townsend Music) and skinned in the band’s aesthetic. A Vevo series which the band had filmed prior was aired at this time, helping build remarketing pools of video viewers. Content included a three-track live session and 30-minute documentary featuring the one and only Gordon Burns. We drove as much traffic to the band’s website or a Genius Link User Choice Landing Page as we knew that this would not only allow us to showcase all retail options seamlessly but also allowed us to create pools of highly engaged fans that could continue to be remarketed to throughout release week with different creatives and offers. Creatives and offers were refreshed on a daily basis, as we did not want the messaging or communication to become stale. These included a lottery for a signed test pressing, a £5 download album incentive and geo-targeted in-store tour ads that focused on fan and lookalike audiences within 80km of towns on the tour.
Enabling Instagram Business Profile allowed us to segment part of the band’s fanbase to determine those that were engaged and, therefore, more likely to support the album’s release, which when you are seven albums into your career, is pretty invaluable.
Similar audience pools were determined using Facebook’s ability to build page engagement Custom Audiences and Google’s video viewer audiences via AdWords, this was only amplified by the coverage offered by the band’s video series with Vevo.
Although we intended to run digital advertising from five platforms, we ended up being banned from two (Twitter and Amazon Marketing Services) due to the profanity in the album’s title! Although we avoided using any bad language on the actual ads, Twitter revokes advertiser access for any account that is seen to be using too much profanity, while Amazon’s platform pulls in product details directly from their store. When the album’s title features the word “Sh★t” this get rather hard to avoid!
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