To record their eighth album , the Foo Fighters went to eight US cities and recorded a track at local studios with local musical figures. Accompanying the trip was a HBO/BBC documentary that chronicled the experience as the band applied their location to their songwriting and explored the musical history of America.
This was the first concept album from the band and we focused our creative and spend on telling the story of the album, using the documentary broadcast dates to inform our timeline. Our objectives in this campaign were to: l Tell the story of the album in an engaging way.
The HBO plot was mirrored for the UK with the BBC; around each episode we put a new video live; made a new track available commercially; added to relevant playlists on Spotify and upweighted all spend accordingly.
We also used relevant media to help tell the story of the album, for example an interactive map on the NME featuring interview footage.
l Use premium formats across targeted inventory and editorial to increase awareness and add scale.
l Use Spotify to build an exciting plot that would help deliver strong streaming numbers and drive album pre-orders. Tracks featured in each episode were added along with a new track in playlists weekly. This was accompanied by a takeover of the Filtr UK Rock playlist and audio/banner inventory.
l Match the scale of the US plot and documentary by achieving global and UK industry firsts, including [the band as] launch partner for the new Twitter audio card. We debuted the first track from the album pushing people to iTunes; we saw daily album pre-orders rise by 60% and new Twitter followers by 95%
l iTunes preorders increased between 60-100% on the release of new content. This was supported by our ad spend, with the UK representing 22% of total clicks (compared to the US’s 38%) on our global iTunes link
l Facebook reach grew x4 and likes increased by 300k over the course of the campaign
l Daily new Twitter followers increased by 10% alongside the new content being released
l Spotify streams rose steadily as new music was made available and peaked at a daily increase of 420% with our playlist plan also helping to peak plays each Friday in line with the tracks going live
l UK paid media outperformed all other territories seeing CTRs of up to 70% on certain formats
KEY LEARNINGS
A unified campaign across digital, TV and press were key in amplifying results and conveying the story of the album to full effect. Although the tablet creative was a great success, we were restricted to displaying interview and pre-roll-style footage due to the HBO contract in place. More performance footage would have increased engagement and also, arguably, clicks to retail. Twitter was a key platform for us when promoting worldwide news and content and the audio card added extra weight to our pre-order plot, allowing fans to listen to the first single in full within their feed.
Project Budget
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