With Franz Ferdinand’s Hits To The Head – their greatest hits, including two new singles – we had the great opportunity to shine a light on the key moments of the band’s career across various media and utilising multiple different activations and content pillars.
Our campaign was preceded by the announcement of the departure of one of the band’s founding members, Paul Thomson, and his replacement, Audrey Tait: this created a peak of engagement from the band’s audience in advance of our album and new single announcements.
From there, superfans – collated via a private mailing list shared to a new superfan group “Our Franz People” across Facebook and Twitter, alongside previous Franz Ferdinand purchasers via the Domino Mart – were sent a teaser postcard with lyrical reference to the announcement single ‘Billy Goodbye’. It included a QR code leading to a new playlist made under the pseudonym of The New Scottish Gentry – an old nom-de-plume from the band’s early years – including snippets of the single. Fans were quick to decipher the puzzle and recognise a new single coming, which was launched alongside the album’s announcement days after.
On announcement of the single and album, we had 18 weeks running into the album’s release. With 18 singles on the album, both old and new, we highlighted one single per week across the band’s social channels – including an anniversary in January 2022 for the band’s legendary single, ‘Take Me Out’.
The band leant into this brilliantly, diving into their archive to dig out some true gold for fans old and new to share online: unseen photography, live performances, classic gig posters, throwback commentary on their official videos, and new versions of old hits.
Our objective of shining these lights across everything to date from Franz Ferdinand was well achieved and honoured Alex Kapranos’ own perspective on the release: “I have friends who believe you’re somehow not a ‘real’ fan if you own a Best Of rather than a discography. I disagree. I think of my parents’ record collection as a kid. I loved those compilation LPs. They were my entrance point. My introduction.”
Hits To The Head hit #7 on UK album chart on release in March 2022; DSP consumption up 27% across the month of release.
Particularly high social engagement across our catalogue content throughout, in particular the celebrations around the ‘Take Me Out’ anniversary in January 2022. Key ‘Take Me Out’ videos on TikTok – each utilising the #HitsToTheHead, #franzferdinand and #festival hashtags – garnered over 300,000 views during the anniversary week. A solo performance video of the song from Alex Kapranos also saw an enormous viewership of 1.7m views. Each of these moments helped grow the band’s audience on platform, as well reach both core and new audiences for the band.
Key audience growth across the campaign was achieved on both TikTok (42,000 new followers (+1,000%)) and Instagram (21,700 new followers (+10%)).
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