Originally recorded to soundtrack Al Reinert’s Apollo documentary, For All Mankind, this year’s 50th moon landing anniversary represented an ideal moment to revisit Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks. The album was remastered for release alongside an album of new collaborations between Brian, Roger Eno and Daniel Lanois – their first since 1983’s original release. Not unusually for ambient music, the album is often consumed via non-artist playlists, presenting an opportunity to grow awareness within a sizeable but passive audience.
The project’s visual potential meant that launching an official presence on Instagram was key. We worked with Facebook to ensure that the profile was immediately verified and promoted across its music pages. The profile provided a flourishing home to the visuals created during the campaign and a place for creative, younger audiences to start engaging with Brian. We brokered agreement from NASA to access its incredible visual archive. Their imagery was used in campaign assets to drive social engagement, culminating in two visually arresting promo videos derived entirely from previously unseen footage.
A long-form piece of video content felt necessary to diligently unpack the album’s deeply emotional themes, leading to Eno On Apollo. The documentary shows Brian, Roger and Daniel discussing the incredible human achievement and looming environmental disaster that inspired them. Topically this is very relevant to mainstream discourse and the younger audience we aimed to engage. We considered a number of partners for launching this film, but decided on Noisey, who we felt fostered a community that would be most receptive to the message.
Brian’s music streams prolifically, but we wanted to further encourage “leanin” behaviour. We made submissions to Spotify’s Storylines alpha test, a new format that allows fans to scroll through visuals and text during mobile playback, encouraging enriched listening. We paired impactful NASA visuals with powerful quotes from Brian. Storylines for the tracks ‘Deep Blue Day’ and ‘Weightless’ were sent live, making Brian the first UK artist to utilise this activation.
Podcasts continue to boast some of the most fervent, engaged online audiences, none more so than Adam Buxton, who hosts the most listened to show in the UK. Brian has featured previously as a guest of Adam’s and is regularly cited as a favourite artist. As such, the opportunity felt exceptionally strong in terms of both scale and relevance, so we commissioned Adam to record a sponsored product read for the album
We set out to create a compelling digital component to the album campaign. This culminated in the album charting at #16, Brian’s highest ever UK chart position and first top-20.
Developing Brian’s social footprint was a central focus for this campaign. Throughout the campaign we observed a three-fold increase in engagement on Brian’s Facebook page. In order to replicate the success story of Brian’s Facebook page, we created an official Instagram and Twitter presences and set up a YouTube OAC, organically growing Brian’s audience by a further 50k by campaign end.
The cosmic visuals saw exceptional advert performance, with a 60% higher CTR than our internal benchmark. Adverts also drove significant growth at artist level, with 4k new followers on Brian’s Instagram profile in the first two days.
The three campaign promo videos saw 131k YouTube views, and a suite of cutdown assets were used to keep socials engaged and active.
Adam Buxton’s sponsored read ran across all episodes of his podcast, meaning that the listeners of multiple episodes would experience the endorsement each time. Thus, Brian was ever present to a significantly relevant and engaged audience of 250k weekly listeners throughout the week of release.
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