The focus of our Billie Eilish UK campaign was on internationally growing her online presence, to make sure that the music was connecting in the UK and to grow Billie’s UK audience ahead of the release of her debut album. The key challenge on release was to drive physical sales and chart position from a very young and streaming-focused audience and to continue to grow awareness of Billie to new audiences outside of music.

From the start of the year for the pre-album release we ran a cross-platform campaign focused on driving followers and volume to Billie’s catalogue playlists on streaming platforms. As she was releasing singles and gaining great traction alongside her previous EP, our challenge was to grow consumption of her whole catalogue. As such, we used the creative of the key catalogue playlists – Essentials on Apple Music and This Is Billie Eilish on Spotify – to drive familiarity, awareness and consumption.

The campaign ran across nationwide digital OOH and had a targeted social media spend to drive fans into the playlist, using the existing Billie videos and the recognisable platform-specific creative. We used UMG Linkfire data and lookalikes for scale to build a representative audience of Apple Music and Spotify users to reduce wastage.

On release we then switched up our strategy to convert the now massive streaming audience into physical sales to impact on the UK chart position. A key initiative here was to partner with Spotify for a Fan First campaign, giving Billie’s top UK listeners an opportunity to purchase a UK exclusive picture disc LP of When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go? – and the 2,000-unit sold out in a matter of minutes. Using the streaming audience that we had invested in and the collectible vinyl products, we brought a young digital audience into the world of physical music consumption.

When looking for potential audiences that fitted with the record, the growing trend of ASMR seemed a perfect fit with Billie’s musical style, current demographic and album title. We reached out to two influential ASMR creators on YouTube with the concept and they created tributes to the album in ASMR form. Using a hot topic and exciting new trend to create not just amazing engaging content reaching new audiences but it grew into a huge news story in the process due to its topical nature.