The original forces’ sweetheart, Dame Vera Lynn reached her 100th birthday on 20th March and, as part of the celebrations, we released an album of her original vocals set to new orchestrations with choir, guest artists and the RAF Squadronnaires, of which her husband was a founder member.
There are plenty of Vera Lynn collections already available, and with documentaries on TV and radio about her life not focused on the new album, directing attention to the album was crucial throughout the campaign.
We had a recording of ‘Sailing’ that had been lost for over 30 years, which was a USP. We made a nostalgic video that was a mix of lyric, picture and storybook. The single was also playlisted on Radio 2.
A website where members of the public could leave birthday messages that we then repurposed into video content as well as guest artist content worked well in owning the online space. We also created a special back page takeover of the Telegraph with a special Vera Lynn crossword and the RAF band performed ‘Happy Birthday’ which we ran on TV ad online.
Across the birthday weekend, we needed to try and focus the general awareness to the album itself. We decided to project the photo of Vera that is on our album cover onto the White Cliffs of Dover (a location strongly associated with her) and feed the picture and video to media. We had the image on front covers of two national newspapers, shown on TV news, mentioned on radio – both in the UK and across the world.
On the day of her birthday, the photo and video quickly became the go-to media to use when mentioning Vera online. We’re not sure how many other 100-year-olds have trended on Twitter! All the time this content was being shared it strengthened the link to our album.
We had further moments in the campaign beyond her birthday to work towards, with guest artist Alfie Boe singing Vera medleys on Britain’s Got Talent and also the Festival Of Remembrance to extend the campaign.
The album went to #3 in the chart, making Vera the only person over 100 to ever have a top 10 album. The album so far has gone Gold and, at the time of submission, Vera is the best-selling female artist in the UK of 2017. We now have a special edition of the album released on the 1st December for Christmas.
Owning the conversation around the birthday was crucial and making shareable, nostalgic content was key. As we’ve seen before, older audiences might not buy digitally, but they are active digitally and, therefore, can still be engaged with appropriate content and the right tone. This was shown with the hundreds of thousands of views of the various videos, sharing and comments across social media as well as almost 1,000 birthday messages left for Vera on our website.
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