In 1963, world-renowned and Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz saxophonist and composer, John Coltrane, recorded a series of songs that were never released. In 2018, fans finally had the opportunity to hear these songs via the release of Both Directions At Once: The Lost Album on Verve Label Group.
Verve Label Group and Fame House’s goal for this album was to drive streams and purchases of the album. To achieve this, Verve Label Group and Fame House devised a comprehensive digital paid media strategy across social media and search/ display placements, beginning with the launch of the album’s pre-order in addition to a robust teaser campaign featuring never-before-seen journals and tapes from the album’s recording at Van Gelder Studio in 1963. Although Coltrane passed decades before the birth of the internet, his official Facebook page has accumulated over 1.2m followers who monitor the page for anecdotes and highlights from the artist’s catalogue.
Similarly, fans still Google for information, images and videos related to John Coltrane on a daily basis. Knowing this, Fame House’s paid media strategy aimed at reaching fans in these online locations with the goal of converting them to purchase. Additionally, Fame House and Verve looked beyond jazz standards and classics by serving ads to fans of hip-hop and funk as a way of reaching listeners who may be accustomed to widely used samples of the jazz greats like Coltrane.
Verve Label Group and Fame House targeted online users that had expressed direct interest in John Coltrane over the years, as well as fans of similar artists or that matched similar demographic profiles of direct fans of John Coltrane. Ads utilised a mix of video containing the new music, images from the box set, and text about the release to entice fans to explore further.
This creative was A/B tested across each online channel to see which content struck a chord with each subset of fans.
Facebook proved to be the most successful platform throughout the campaign since it allowed for wider targeting based on interests fans had expressed on the social network, as well as the ability for more dynamic photo video content than possible on search and display. Fans on Facebook were also exposed to multiple pieces of content throughout the campaign, allowing for a larger story to be told around the album’s release. Impulse Records/Verve Label Group also created a Coltrane Trivia campaign where fans could test their knowledge of John Coltrane and engage fans with the branding of The Lost Album: Both Directions At Once.
Phase two of the campaign included a Coltrane covers campaign where fans were encouraged to enter a hashtag social media campaign by posting their covers of tracks from the album to unlock never before seen footage of Ravi Coltrane at Van Gelder Studio where his father, John Coltrane, recorded the album.
Interestingly, nearly 60% of link clicks throughout the campaign were attributed to look-alike audiences of fans
that may not have directly followed Coltrane’s pages, but were demographically similar to those direct fans. This may indicate that direct fans were aware of the album and chose to purchase through their preferred means of buying music, and therefore didn’t need the help of advertisements to be reminded to purchase.
Furthermore, clicks to Linkfire were almost evenly split across social media and Google’s search and display network despite a majority of the budget being allocated to Facebook and Instagram. Google display also yielded a more inexpensive cost-per-click, indicating that John Coltrane fans may be more likely to purchase music while browsing the web than while scrolling through their news feeds.
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Demographics
