To celebrate 25 years of Steps, The Platinum Collection album was released across a multitude of special D2C formats, with new single ‘Hard 2 Forget’ and a Megamix – serving as a sevenminute reminder of the hits from the past two decades.

Nostalgia was a key component of the digital strategy. Pre-release (and still ongoing), we tapped into nostalgia on Steps’ YouTube and social channels by sharing 94 pieces of content, including never-before-released archive footage, lyric videos, live performances and all the official videos upgraded to HD or 4K.

A Vevo footnotes piece was shot at the Vevo studio and supported across Vevo channels – both online and TV. The strong video campaign was also accompanied by a YouTube Premiere of the album’s focus track, ‘Hard 2 Forget’, and live Q&A with the band.

In January, a sped-up version of ‘5,6,7,8’ trended on TikTok, naturally kicking off the start of this campaign. We got the band to lean in and pitched to TikTok for support.

A strong social strategy was paramount to engage fans, old and new. We partnered with Twitter for a branded Steps25 emoji and an in-platform live Q&A using Twitter’s VIT app.

With GIPHY we created a ‘90s-themed Instagram Stories sticker pack, which the band used across socials encouraging fans to go wild with their Stories. The sticker pack received a total of 29.7m views.

We captured a host of content with the band, bespoke for each platform including Misheard Steps Lyrics for TikTok, Stepback Sunday for Reels and Steps BFF Test for Facebook.

Increasing voice streams was a key objective for this campaign and we teamed up with the Amazon Alexa team to produce a three-part voice campaign. The first part saw a video of the band bantering Alexa with a programmed tongue-in-cheek play on lyrics. Fans were also treated to a surprise Easter egg when speaking “Alexa, what is your favourite Steps song?”, with Alexa singing along to ‘5,6,7,8’ in response. Bespoke Amazon Voice Activations were also delivered to encourage repeated streaming peaks throughout the campaign.