After a breakout year in 2021, JVKE blew up into AWAL’s biggest streaming artist worldwide in 2022 culminating in the current huge global reaction to new single ‘golden hour’ alongside the release of his debut album, this is what ____ feels like.

Our social strategy focused on short-form personal content from JVKE himself, highlighting different elements of his songwriting, production process and musicality, all while tapping heavily into the emotional core of the songs themselves. JVKE posted a wide range of content, from comedy skits to surprise public performances to heart-warming videos featuring old teachers and family members. Videos were carefully drip-fed over several weeks rather than targeting a single spike, leading to a number of global viral moments and over 300m views.

While TikTok remained a focus, we diversified with a consistent flow of original content for YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, supported by paid spends in top territories to increase reach and bring in new fans, also mirroring top posts in local languages to maximise impact. JVKE quickly became one of the top artists on YouTube Shorts, growing his audience 10x in six months. At its peak, JVKE had the biggest weekly growth of all artist accounts on TikTok.

Global TikTok creator campaigns tapped into multiple content verticals and niche communities to increase UGC, plus further content seeding campaigns on lyric and music channels, and Instagram Reels, each pairing viral videos and romantic content with regular and sped up-versions of ‘golden hour’. Campaigns were run in numerous territories in local languages with custom content to help embed JVKE in the wildly different cultures of his key markets.

Pre-release, JVKE opened a Superphone SMS text line, giving access to unreleased track snippets and asking fans which songs should make it on the record, growing his SMS list to 300k in six months.

On album release, a live global listening party across socials saw fans come together with JVKE and his friends to experience the album firsthand as it dropped worldwide, before being redirected to 12 consecutive YouTube video premieres revealing new visuals for each track, followed by a Reddit AMA on r/music (30m reach), a Bandlab online remix competition, global MTV PUSH campaign and OOH from Spotify, YouTube and Amazon.