British electronic duo Honne returned this year with a brand new mixtape titled No Song Without You.

To kickstart the campaign we decided to archive all their Instagram posts and share cryptic teasers to introduce the new aesthetic for the mixtape. The band also released the chords from the song ahead of release and invited fans to make their own versions of the song before they heard it, resulting in a compilation with the best entries.

YouTube has always been a key platform for the band so we developed a strategy to super-serve their fans on there. It started with the official video – an animated video directed by Holly Warburton – which premiered on YouTube with the band chatting and watching with fans. Following the release of the video, fans connected with the characters in the video straight away so we decided to run Twitter and Instagram polls to let fans name them.

We also created Instagram stickers with the characters and they became a part of the visual identity for social assets throughout the campaign. We wanted to re-engage their YouTube subscribers in the lead up to the release of the mixtape, so we launched a series of weekly live streams. The first two happened pre-release, with performances of tracks from their previous albums. The last stream happened on the week of release, with the band performing songs from the mixtape.

With Honne’s audience being so international we knew we had to make lyric videos for each track on the mixtape. We got the animator to create a series of lyric videos including the characters in different environments, which were very appreciated by fans.

Seeing the success of the YouTube livestreams, we also got the band to experiment with different platforms to further connect with fans. The band did an intimate Zoom gig, where they spoke to fans between songs and performed one of the songs with a fan, as well as a Twitch livestream playing Animal Crossing, which ended up in a very cosy session with the band playing songs during loading screens.

It was important for us to keep fans engaged throughout the weeks, so we worked with The Firepit to develop an Instagram lens including a lyric generator picking lyrics and playing audio snippets from the different tracks on the mixtape. Further on, we developed a mixtape generator letting fans make their own mixtape and send it to “the person they feel there’d be no song without”.

We also extended the campaign with the release of an acoustic EP that was released alongside two beautiful live videos, both shot at the Tate Britain, to keep their YouTube audience engaged post-release.