The campaign began with an in-depth report from our internal insights team to understand Andrea’s audiences and their habits – online and offline. This would help us decide a creative direction as well as plan and allocate media spends. Key findings included that our core audience consumes news online in a web browser, uses Facebook as their primary social network and consumes music online using YouTube.
Sì is Andrea’s first album of new music in 14 years, so it was vital that the strength of the new songs was forefront; and the album included duet partners such as Ed Sheeran, Dua Lipa, and Andrea’s son, Matteo Bocelli. We also knew that the track ‘Fall On Me’ would appear on Disney’s The Nutcracker soundtrack. This presented enormous opportunities to leverage with our digital spend and led us to develop creatives that would resonate with these audiences, tapping into new fanbases too. We took a storytelling approach, relying on video
that focused on the connection between Andrea’s music and his family.
Central to the campaign was Andrea’s duet with his son, Matteo, which culminated in a music video for ‘Fall On Me’. This connected perfectly. Just one month after launch it has become one of Andrea’s most-viewed videos of all time. To celebrate, YouTube presented Andrea with their golden button award, marking the milestone of 1m channel subscribers – the first ever classical singer to achieve this feat! We also filmed a Facebook Live Q&A two days before release, solidifying the father and son bond portrayed in the video.
Andrea’s reach is global and this was reflected in the assets we produced, which were recorded in multiple languages including Italian, English, Spanish, and even Russian. To exploit this, we ran ads targeting users based on their device’s language settings. For example, Russian fans living in the UK would have seen Russian language versions of our advertising.
We carefully reused data throughout the campaign and remarketed to fans with newer and more relevant content, including clips from Andrea’s appearances on US and UK television. We never ran one piece of video for more than a few days, and consistently refreshed the visuals, meaning the frequency amongst our audience showed huge increases in brand lift.
Once we had developed our creative strategy, we focused on platforms where we knew our audience would be. We built Facebook placements optimised for awareness, and reused data to push fans through the marketing funnel. This meant we enjoyed Facebook ads which performed above benchmark across the board, encouraging strong social growth. At the forefront was our Facebook Canvas creative; a customisable and immersive storytelling format which gives us a way to tell the full story of the album and which achieved an incredibly low CPM.
Our Facebook Live Q&A reached 904.1k people and achieved 159.3k engagements. It was a huge moment for us at a key time for awareness, overperforming at a rate of 28x above benchmark.
The multi-language ads were also a huge success, and saw us achieve an incredibly efficient CPM rate at half of benchmark (£9.14 against a benchmark of £18.53).
We ran a search and display campaign through the Google Display Network, focusing on The Nutcracker, and audiences of shows where Andrea had made TV appearances (such as The New York Times, CNN, and Billboard).
On YouTube, we ran TrueView ads, and took advantage of a new feature where we could target user uploaded content featuring our music with YouTube Cards, directing viewers to official content and retail.
Our global Linkfire link generated circa 300k clicks over the course of the four-month campaign.
In its opening week, Sì became a #1 album in both the UK and US album charts. Andrea Bocelli’s first #1 album ever, and 20 years after the last classical album topped the UK chart.
Project Budget
Demographics
