Eyedress’s third album, Let’s Skip To The Wedding, was due for release in Q1 2020, but the pandemic led to it being pushed back to Q3, with all live activity put on hold. Without a live plot, we focused on growing his social media and streaming followers with singles, and building on the existing organic activity on TikTok. With Eyedress’s authenticity paramount for his fanbase, we had to approach this with care.

In late 2020, Eyedress’s single ‘Jealous’ began going viral on TikTok. We quickly began a rolling digital marketing campaign with Motive Unknown to support the growth and aid discovery of the track on DSPs. Over the next sixto-nine months, Eyedress’s streaming boomed and we built up a large retargeting list of engaged fans across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

It also provided the opportunity to fine tune our digital marketing approach in advance of the next album campaign. Our aim was to make the Mulholland Drive release an unmissable event and elevate Eyedress from viral star to cultural phenomenon by delivering a series of hits that would ensure longterm success. Unlike many other TikTok viral hits, Eyedress’s streaming hasn’t dropped off after the initial spike.

We instated the following campaign elements to support the releases:

• Created eight music videos, working with Eyedress’ friends and creatives from his community in LA;

• Supported TikTok growth with free tier advertising on Spotify and YouTube;

• Highlighted tracks that were gaining traction and marketed them to fans of Eyedress and related artists;

• Hired promo teams in seven of Eyedress’s key territories; supported by physical marketing in LA. We wanted to translate the success in the digital world and make it tangible.

With Eyedress picking up huge amounts of organic traction on TikTok, the goal for this album in terms of digital spend was to connect the dots between people hearing the song on TikTok and going on to stream on DSPs. We saw the fruits of this labour with a second viral TikTok track, ‘Something About You’, which has been used on 250,000 videos and has amassed over 18m streams on Spotify. The key to the strategy was to avoid short-term cheap vanity metrics and instead bring new audiences into Eyedress’s online touchpoints to convert them into longterm fans.

We pushed heavily for awareness on YouTube Ads using copy and imagery that alluded to parts of the songs that were going viral. We targeted this to the trends using the songs on TikTok and then continued to resurface new videos to these audiences as the album campaign ran on. This was matched by continuous on-platform Spotify advertising that further capitalised on increased streams.