Coming off the back of two huge hit singles, our challenge with Rudimental was to develop a deeper and more meaningful level of connection with the group in order to turn casual singles buyers into album purchasers.

Videos are a key element of Rudimental’s releases – every one of their visuals shines a light on a certain subculture and reinforces the themes of unity and positivity that runs through their music, so YouTube has been a key platform for our campaign. We’ve used all the weapons at our disposal to maximise views, including custom-animated end screens pointing to different uploads, a custom subscriber trailer for the channel and 30-second teaser trailers for the launch of their videos asking fans to subscribe. Views on their channel are now over 100m and we’ve increased their subscriber base by 750% since the start of the year. We knew in order to pull in an album-buying audience we needed to aggressively drive our email list. We started by putting up ‘Hell Could Freeze’ ft. Angel Haze for signup. We collected over 10k sign-ups in the first 24 hours and increased the email list by 1,200% over the three-week duration of the campaign. We then followed this up with a pre-sale ticket incentive allowing fans advanced access to their April and May tour if they signed up. As a final push, we partnered with Shazam to offer a free remix EP. Whenever a user tagged the track ‘Free’ with Shazam, they’d be notified of the free download offer and the whole sign-up process could be done without leaving the app.

In the build-up to the album release, we launched a multiplatform social initiative where fans could define what the word ‘home’ meant to them using the hashtag #Thisishome on Vine, Instagram or Twitter. The resulting submissions formed an online mural that was used as the splash page for the band’s website and the 10 best entries received a signed copy of the album on release. We saw over 5k submissions to this campaign and the dwell time on the site increased to over nine minutes. This also allowed us to keep a soft sell of the album message front and centre during release week by posting up the band’s favourite fan submissions.