Adverts are usually endured rather than enjoyed. When you’re working on a limited budget, you need every penny spent on content and media to count; you need to cut through and so surprising your audience with something they haven’t seen or heard before is going to be your best route to success.

Live has always been one of First Aid Kit’s strengths and we wanted to put performance front and centre when marketing their fourth album, Ruins. The plan was to record the band’s duets using the state-of-the-art audio equipment and give fans the opportunity to hear their vocals in the best possible environments; an innovative harmony between content and media. Cinema and podcasts were chosen given the respective sound quality and intimacy of each medium.

To add the element of surprise, we recorded entire “sound scenes” binaurally – a first for any music cinema campaign
– that allows the audience to hear in full 360-degree surround sound. The creative featured the sisters singing acoustic versions of the lead singles whilst walking around the Zylia microphone allowing the audience to feel at the centre of their harmonies.

The band’s audience tend to be 25+ and ABC1 – and their cultural consumption leans towards ‘indie’ media, therefore arthouse cinemas (with full Dolby sound) were a natural choice, especially as the album release coincided with Oscar season. For the podcast adverts, we worked with Acast to target film, music and culture shows, testing two different tracks to maximise the higher frequency of this channel.