Canadian singer Rêve had a multi-platform approach to promoting her ‘CTRL + ALT + DEL’ single in 2021, including targeting the dance, gaming, horror, LGBTQ+, astrology and fashion communities online. 

Perhaps the most interesting approach in the whole campaign was taking her into Reddit to capitalise on the track being used in the FIFA22 football game as the game itself loads. 

She was an artist that had no real connections with a football audience before this sync and the strategy from Universal Music Canada was to find ways to jump from the FIFA sync into online discussions about the game. 

The marketing team targeted subreddit groups discussing football and FIFA (as well as those discussing dance and music) to try and build a conversation around Rêve and her track. 

They worked with Soar, a Reddit marketing company, who used one of its accounts to post in relevant subreddit threads to try and find organic ways to plug the track. On every targeted Reddit thread, a link to the official video was added. 

This could have been a risky move as Reddit users can be highly territorial about the threads they contribute to and do not like feeling they are being hijacked and marketed to. There is the additional risk of users reporting your posts as marketing and/or spam that can see them swiftly removed. 

Their approach was to seek out existing threads about the FIFA soundtrack rather than trying to create a thread specifically about it or Rêve’s track on it. That way they were not trying to engineer discussions about the music and could instead jump on discussions that were happening organically and then add a link to the video on YouTube.

In this way, the marketing approach was designed to contribute to existing conversations rather than trying to orchestrate them.

Universal Music Canada also told us that each post they added to the Reddit threads was getting between 200 and 600 upvotes. The end result was that Reddit became the third-highest external traffic driver for the ‘CTRL + ALT + DEL’ video.

On a platform like Reddit, marketing is eminently possible but it needs to be done carefully and contextually. 

(We will run a Behind The Campaign piece on Rêve in an upcoming edition of Sandbox.)