With two albums already under her belt, Grey Area is Little Simz’s third album to date. From the offset, we felt this was the record that would gain the biggest attention for her career so far, from strong critical acclaim at press and radio, to nominations for the Mercury Awards and more.

We wanted the Grey Area campaign to be innovative, intelligent and multifaceted – just like Little Simz herself. The key objective was not focused on chart placement but on building a large, and most importantly, diverse and deeply engaged community of fans.

We identified a broad range of target audiences uniquely available to Simz. Our strategy focused on bespoke approaches to reaching these people whilst maintaining creative consistency.

To deliver on this objective, we put together an ambitious plan that tied press, radio, TV, synch, streaming and digital marketing together. We led with strong creative, consistent content, a layered ad strategy and some marquee moments.

We spent a lot of time doing the groundwork at press and radio, working with long lead times to get the right people onboard and build momentum on each release.

Little Simz wanted to create the artwork herself and this laid the basis of the strong visual that ran throughout the campaign – starting with the digital clues she dropped ahead of announcement to the singles artwork she photographed herself, culminating in a massive Little Simz bus fan event with YouTube and a joyous exhibition release party at Somerset House.

The track listing was kept secret throughout the campaign and was slowly revealed a week ahead of album utilising Instagram stickers in an innovative way.

All of this ground work led to the largest spike in activity, streams and sales that Little Simz had up until that moment. This gave us momentum to help sustain the campaign over the summer and for the rest of the year. It allowed us to create an even larger moment around the week of the Mercury Awards with new content and a coordinated push across TV, outdoor and digital marketing.