Leonard Cohen is a legendary Canadian poet and songwriter who passed away in 2016 after living a life which impacted music and pop culture all around the world. Surrounding the release of his posthumous album, Thanks For The Dance, we were given the unique task of launching his official Instagram account. Our main goals were to grow his audience, engage fans around the album during its release and to create an ongoing destination for the exploration of Leonard’s legacy.
To support the album release, we launched the official account along with a stylised Instagram Storybook experience which took the visual themes of the album (a leather-bound book of writings from Leonard Cohen’s journal) into the world of social media. Instagram Highlights were created for each track on the album, showcasing the lyrics in a way which mimicked the action of paging through a book, but in the digital world, as each action was a swipe through an Instagram Story. This gave new fans a beautiful way to really engage with each track and digest the lyrics from Leonard fully.
Upon the release of the full album, we brought this visual aesthetic to the world of Spotify, being one of the first artists to utilise the new Spotify Storylines features. In a similar aesthetic to the Instagram Stories, we designed the Spotify Storylines to create a companion experience for the listener, providing them with visual accompaniment to each track and short commentary on the making-of, bringing them deeper into the creative process of Leonard’s work. These visuals were featured alongside each track within the Spotify app.
Finally, our post-release strategy focused on creating a digital space for newcomers to Leonard, to learn more about his impact and continue to feed them with content. To curate this account, we worked closely with Leonard Cohen’s son, his record label and his estate to share archival photos and videos. Through a focus on quotes from Leonard’s writings, interviews, global artistic representations like murals, paintings, musical covers of his most well-known songs, and Instagram Reels/IGTV content, we fostered a highly engaged fanbase which continues to grow.
Over the course of less than a year, we successfully grew the Leonard Cohen account from 0 to 52,000 followers, with an average weekly engagement rate of almost 10%. At the onset of the project, we consistently monitored the weekly performance of competitor accounts (John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Patti Smith and others) to compare our performance. Each week, our engagement rate is about triple the average of those accounts, showing that our content is resonating with our growing audience.
As we continue to grow and experiment with varying content types, we expect these results only to improve.
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