For the marketing around Collage 2, the debut mini album from Conor Albert, the Young Poet label worked with strategic marketing company Motive Unknown to capitalise on online buzz with a very small budget. 

Given the spending restrictions, the focus was on identifying and then re-targeting people who had encountered any of his viral content online. This was done with a long-term view of turning them from passive viewers into active fans. 

Any track or piece of content needs a great deal of serendipity to truly become viral and really travel far and wide on the internet. The quickest way to do that is to luck into someone extremely famous commenting on the music and reposting it to their millions of fans. Which is a lot easier than it sounds. 

In the case of Albert, his videos were shared by media-shy underground musician, erm, Justin Bieber, so it was already far down the line before a marketing push was put behind it. 

Fans of Bieber were swiftly retargeted with a set of ads that made reference to the fact that the Canadian pop star was a fan of Albert. 

Motive Unknown MD Darren Hemmings says the spend was focused heavily around Instagram Reels and Stories as this was where Albert was having the most success organically.

“Beyond this, we also wanted to increase broader awareness of Conor, but still kept this specific by targeting a selection of similar artists/collaborators, media outlets where Conor had received coverage, and music production companies and instrument manufacturers, due to Conor’s links with this community,” says Hemmings. 

The net result was that the campaign saw some of the strongest ad cost performance for a Motive Unknown campaign and had a CTR of 75% to streaming services.

Of course, not every campaign is going to be endorsed by one of the biggest pop stars in the world; but if it is, capitalising on that can be done swiftly and, more enticingly, it can be done relatively inexpensively.