In May 2018, the Jerry Garcia Family LLC, Round Records and ATO Records released Before The Dead, a collection of Jerry’s earliest known folk & bluegrass recordings, pre-dating the formation of The Grateful Dead in 1965.

From the start, we aimed to market this release to the core audience of Garcia/Grateful Dead fans (AKA Deadheads), bluegrass fans and also enthusiasts of the rapidly burgeoning Americana genre. First, in order to increase awareness about Garcia’s role in the development of the Americana, we teamed up with The Bluegrass Situation to co-present Jubilee: A Celebration Of Jerry Garcia at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles, which featured an all-star cast of today’s most visible artists on the Americana/roots rock scene.

On the digital side, we partnered with key DSPs to service the music to key fan and genre audiences. We teamed up with the Spotify curation team to create a revamped This Is Jerry Garcia playlist which was promoted across the platform and our socials and featured the new music from Before The Dead alongside Jerry’s later folk & bluegrass side projects including Old & In The Way, the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band, Garcia Grisman, along with collaborations with Link Wray, CSNY (Jerry played pedal steel on ‘Teach Your Children’) and more. We also worked with our reps and programmers at Apple, Amazon, and Pandora on spotlighting the new release in platform- curated playlists, new
release placement and social media promotion.

As Jerry is considered one of the most prolific live performers of all time, it was only natural for us to team up with Ticketmaster to send an email advertising a discount of the release to affinity touring acts. We were able to target a significant number of fans which generated a very competitive open rate and CTR which led to a significant boost in week one sales.

We also worked with WSM 650, the original home of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville (a station Jerry listened to as a kid) and KZSU Stanford (which originally broadcasted some of the recordings) to get the release on air in front of bluegrass/roots enthusiasts which also made for a unique marketing tie-in given both of the stations’ roles in Jerry’s
musical development.

Our social media plan was to highlight Jerry’s rise as a budding folk and bluegrass musician in the Bay Area folk scene of the early 1960s through sharing rare photos and detailed historical notes from the release. We were also able to refurbish the oldest-known video of Jerry Garcia playing music with new audio from the release which we posted on social media to the delight of fans and used in our paid retargeting campaign with Gupta.

In addition to sharing anecdotes from Jerry’s friends and collaborators, we also reposted record stores and fans’ photos of their vinyl sets and executed the retargeting campaign with Gupta to core Garcia fans along with bluegrass and folk fans on Facebook, Instagram, and Google/YouTube. This sustained output of content on all Garcia channels greatly increased awareness about the project for the duration of the campaign.