Our first step in teasing fans on new album Freakout/Release was utilising a new direct-to-fan AAA pass, which encouraged email sign-up and fan participation in exchange for windowed content access and more. Working with planet.fans, fans sign up for a personalised pass for their digital wallets, gaining access to exclusive studio content to tease the new album and further exclusives. The pass lives within their smartphone’s wallet, delivering direct notifications to the users on bespoke content releases throughout the campaign, and continues to be used during the band’s live dates moving forward with further bonus material.
As we approached the Freakout/ Release announcement, we teased what was to come with a refresh of the band’s DSP properties and two freshly curated playlists, leaning into the Freakout/Release theme – titled Bangers and Ballads. Bangers leaned into Hot Chip’s dancefloor favourites, such as ‘Over and Over’, with Ballads taking on ‘A Bath Full of Ecstasy’ and so on. Fans would visit a gated website, then follow both the band and playlists across DSP channels and further drive our streaming engagement in advance of the new album.
We kept the new tradition of innovative digital presentation of our Hot Chip releases, within the scope of the album’s themes. We worked with Pretty Good Digital in developing a playlist generator which would give users an artist-curated playlist based on their Spotify listening history and its BPM. If you were on the lower end of the scale, a more ambient playlist titled Release would be offered. The higher it was, you were Freakout – a fun activation that utilised the album’s artwork and themes well.
Going into album release week, we further drove pre-orders with a fresh incentive for fans: any album pre-order via the band’s web store would enter fans into a raffle to win a signed Yamaha synthesiser from the band’s live setup. A true reward for the most super of Hot Chip fans.
The campaign proved a great success in solidifying and continuing to modernise the band’s legacy, earning them another top 20 UK album chart position and helping to drive sales and awareness for their celebratory four-night residency at London’s Brixton Academy.
Through our teaser and warm-up exercises using planet.fans, we managed to gain insights into the band’s mostengaged fans, of which approximately 2,000 signed up.
The Bangers and Ballads playlists helped drive a further 1,000 followers to the band’s playlist properties, whilst our Freakout/Release playlist generator gained a further 500 users. Increasing the band’s direct-to-fan user volumes was a key objective, so these exercises proved particularly fruitful as each accrued valuable email data.
Substantial social growth throughout the campaign: the Instagram audience grew by 16% from announcement to release. Instagram Reels and TikTok also proved fruitful in finding new followers for the band organically, with catalogue cutdowns utilising the #festival hashtag through the summer proving most impactful.
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