For The Wombats’ fourth album, Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life (the first record since coming out of a major label deal), we wanted to tap into their new generation of young fans. A core part of our campaign strategy was to capitalise both streaming and deluxe physical products, bundling huge sell-out venues, hyped up in-store performances with album sales as well as creating other fun incentives, including our very first chat bot, The Wombot.

Fan engagement was a huge priority for the campaign, as well as broadening and building their audience through innovative digital ideas, key radio and promo opportunities.

The band’s social media profiles were used as a hub for campaign activity and fan interaction; we worked with social media strategists Be-Hookd, to create bespoke content plans that spoke to this younger audience. Prior to launch, we had a social blackout which caused mass anticipation and conversation with 4x engagement rate of average posts. We teased song titles through emoji tracklisting clues, created spoof film clips and created a faux live stream to celebrate the band’s return.

Alongside our social media blackout, we had a mysterious outdoor poster campaign popping up around London which teased the album title and a website address.

The website showed a countdown clock (to announcement date) and no other information – which turned into the announcement page for the album.

To continue to develop our direct-to- fan engagement, we worked with Motive Unknown and Pop to build a chat bot called The Wombot. In an age where it can become hard to reach your fans because of algorithms, having that direct relationship you get from a chatbot was quite a valuable thing. We love a pun, so obviously the only name we could call The Wombat’s bot was Wombot! Essentially used as a news bot, we took it to another level during the band’s sold-out show at Alexandra Palace in London. At the show, we had messages on the large stage-side screens offering a meet & greet with the band if you signed up to the bot. We also partnered with UNILAD Sound for a global webcast of the show which was available VOD post-event.

Although the streaming strategy was at the forefront, we wanted to make sure that we catered to the hardcore fanbase with deluxe products and bundles. The band played nine underplay shows in seven days during release week, so in order to drive physical pre-order in the younger demographic we ran a D2C ticket bundle presale via Pledge which was a strong fan incentive that helped our chart place. Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life charted at #3 in UK, making it the highest new entry that week.