While having Ed Sheeran in the market on a Nordic promo visit, we collaborated together with Spotify and its Nordic flagship playlist brand, It’s Hits, to set up a secret show in Stockholm. Our objectives for this campaign were to create a fan-engaging, fun competition that would bring the artist closer to his fans with a chance to win something really exclusive that money couldn’t buy (a private, intimate Ed Sheeran concert), while maximising the visibility of both the artist and his songs on Spotify.

To engage fans, we set up a digital scavenger hunt in the It’s Hits playlists across the Nordics. To maximise the visibility of the Equals album campaign, we used the platform’s biggest ad spaces – such as mobile home banners, PHPTOs and playlist clips – to drive traffic to the local It’s Hits playlists, where we negotiated with Spotify to hold all Ed Sheeran singles, have Ed dominating the playlists visually with covers, clips where Ed explains the rules of the scavenger hunt and #1 position with the new single ‘Shivers’.

For the actual competition, we created a landing page, where different coloured butterflies were flying around the screen. The fans had to catch the right colour butterfly in order to register to win tickets to the secret show in Stockholm. To register to win the tickets, the fans had to leave their email addresses, which we gathered for future campaign mailouts around the album release. On the landing page with butterflies, the fans were encouraged to visit It’s Hits playlist on Spotify to find out which particular butterflies they had to catch on the website.

On the It’s Hits playlist clips, we had Ed explaining the rules of the competition. The fans were told that all four butterflies could be found in the playlist. We edited one of the butterflies (a blue one from the ‘Visiting Hours’ single cover) to one of the video clips. If the fans scrolled down the playlist, they would realise that the two other butterflies could be found from Ed’s single covers (a pink one from ‘Bad Habits’ and a yellow one from the ‘Shivers’ single cover).

The fourth and final butterfly was a riddle based on the playlist clips, where we asked what colour butterfly the ‘X’ would be? (referencing Sheeran’s album X which had a green cover). Once the fans found all four coloured butterflies (blue from the first clip, pink and yellow from the track covers, and the green one by figuring out the riddle), they were given access to register for the competition.

The competition ran for four days across all Nordic countries, with winners flying into Stockholm from each country. The competition was supported by Spotify through mobile-home banners, PHPTOs, flagship playlist clips as well as editorially. Moreover, Spotify supported the campaign on their socials and we pushed it through digital marketing in all four Nordic countries – Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland.