Our central goal for the release of Dan Mangan’s More Or Less album was to re-introduce Dan to his core fans and remind them what it was that made them love him and his music in the first place. We needed to communicate that Dan (winner of multiple Juno awards) was returning to his roots after his last album, a more experimental departure from his classic singer/ songwriter material.

We wanted to communicate that Dan was “back” with his beloved baritone voice and acoustic guitar. We began with a soft launch on 13th February, leveraging Valentine’s Day by releasing one of Dan’s first true love songs, ‘Fool For Waiting’. The song is an ode to his wife and we communicated the idea of finding love. The song was accompanied by a beautifully shot video which touched on the themes we were communicating. We then released the single ‘Troubled Mind’, a radio rocker. We teased the track with the single art and launched a social campaign encouraging people to post photos of themselves with little emoji flames on their heads. Dan then reposted the photos that were sent to him.

This also tied in with the lyric video for the song which established our visual aesthetic for the campaign. We would continue to release matching lyric videos throughout the campaign, culminating in the video for ‘Cold In The Summer’ – an hilarious and perfect accompanying piece to the song which focuses on the challenge of fatherhood.

Throughout the campaign we focused on super-serving Dan’s core fanbase. We developed a web series focusing on his songwriting process, which will continue over the next year. We also developed a multi-camera live-stream gameshow broadcast on Instagram called More Or Less; the programme was an hour long and fans could vote “more” or “less” to control the action on screen.

We also developed a simple playlist app using Spotify’s public API which caused users to follow Dan and add the playlist to their library. Our goal was to keep Dan’s fans talking about him and wanting more.