Whitesnake’s The Purple Album was released on 15th May 2015 On Frontiers Records. The album is a selection of newly recorded Deep Purple songs performed by Whitesnake and frontman David Coverdale who has been a member of both bands.

Our main goal for the campaign was to not only build anticipation with the existing Whitesnake fanbase but also build further cohesion and engagement with the Deep Purple fanbase.

The initial pre-release campaign involved rolling out re-brandings and an animated splash as well as a hashtag wall to be used in the post-release phase.

Remarketing pixels were included on whitesnake.com and links, which were used for both pre-orders and track/video premieres.

The band released several videos, allowing us to cross-promote the release to fans of Deep Purple. For the ‘Soldier Of Fortune’ video, a short 15-second clip was taken from the start of the video allowing us to use Facebook’s native Facebook format to drive traffic to a monetised source (YouTube) while also creating a pool of those who watch the video via Facebook custom audiences that we could remarket to closer to the album’s release.

As the band have a large fanbase in Germany (and due to licensing issues faced with putting music on YouTube in the territory), we premiered the video, in its entirety, natively on the band’s Facebook page along with messaging in local language. Come the week of release, an allencompassing advertising campaign was rolled out (Facebook video, search, YouTube pre-rolls, banners) which drove 1,522,073 impressions and 242,510 video views. This took advantage of the substantial remarketing list (90,000+) that was gathered during the first phase of the campaign that captured data on both Deep Purple and Whitesnake audiences.

A competition that encouraged fans to share their Deep Purple memories, photographs and fan artwork that celebrated David’s time in the band was set up. Fans were encouraged to share their memories with the hashtag #PurpleAlbumWS and the best entries were showcased on Whitesnake.com via SnapWidget driving further awareness of retail outlets that were also profiled on the site. In the weeks that followed release, a series of track-by-track videos were seeded on the band’s social networks giving David a platform to explain to fans what the tracks meant to him personally in addition to a series of Purple Memories videos that created a platform for David to reminisce about his time in the band.