Three years had passed since the band’s fifth album, so over the entire campaign for the sixth album, For Crying Out Loud, we knew we had to reignite the core fans and drive awareness in younger fans.

Before the announcement, we analysed what the core fans engaged with the most on the band’s social accounts – outside of big announcements. Using that data, we made sure to capture photos and videos of the band in the studio, as well as, capture live footage from their shows at the Sydney Opera House.

In addition, on the video shoot for their single ‘You’re In Love With a Psycho’, we partnered with LADBible who had exclusive behind-the-scenes access on the set to highlight the cameos from Noel Fielding and Stephen Graham. Without giving too much away, the LADbible footage showed that there was something going on and there was new music coming. It was to tease the release prior to the album, tour and single announcement. After the announcement, we had a short run to drive further awareness of the release beyond their core fans.

From looking at the fanbase’s interests online we had a few verticals to work with that reached beyond music. Gaming was one of those verticals; as a result, we worked with Amazon and Twitch across two activations. The first was built around the band’s love of the FIFA game and resulted in the band gaming live on their own channel with two influential FIFA Twitchers. During this live stream, the band announced that they were going to stream their entire show from Kentish Town Forum in London on the same channel two days later. This tied in perfectly with our goal to reach the younger fans. In addition, as Twitch is owned by Amazon, this enabled us to work with them to secure further promotion around the album announcement.

Knowing that Facebook Live was going to be important on this campaign – we left Serge from the band to come up with an idea. He wanted to shoot a live video for their eight-minute track ‘Are You Looking For Action?’ and so we partnered with LADbible to shoot this during the album release week. It was simulcast across the Kasabian and the LADbible Facebook pages, remaining online for 24 hours before we published it on the band’s Vevo channel. Serge and Aitor (the director) were getting really excited about the probability that things would go wrong. With that in mind, the video features a lot of extras, wearing fancy dress as characters from previous video campaigns.

Six weeks after the album was released, and around the same time that the UK football season ended, we launched a Kasabian-branded fantasy football league powered by Spotify data giving fans the chance to win a VIP experience at Reading & Leeds Festival. The league ran for six weeks with the band’s catalogue representing different positions on the pitch. After selecting the tracks in your 4-4-2 formation, they then selected their name and kit design. This was intentionally placed after the release to prolong the long tail streaming of the music.