Taylor Swift fans know all too well that she drops cryptic clues in her social media posts and videos; and Taylor Swift knows all too well that her fans comb her every utterance for some clues which will somehow unlock some greater understanding of her and her art (or, more specifically, her release schedule).
Swift tends to be subtle here, dropping clues but not drawing attention to the fact that she is, indeed, dropping clues. But on 5th August she took a sledgehammer approach when posting a 30-second video clip on Twitter.
It featured a vault opening and a series of 13-letter words springing out and then quickly dissolving. “Level: casually cruel in the name of being honest,” she posted.
Fans immediately leapt into action, scribbling down the clues, sharing them online and trying collectively to figure out what was going on.
They soon twigged it was a word search puzzle and set about creating colour-coded worksheets to crack it.
The biggest clues were “feat”, “Phoebe”, “Bridgers”, “Ed”, “Sheeran”, “Chris” and “Stapleton”, all appearing in the assorted words they detected.
She didn’t leave her fans hanging too long, posting the next day that many had cracked the assorted clues and confirmed that the re-recording of her Red album would actually come out on 19th November with a range of featured artists that included – you guessed it – Phoebe Bridgers, Ed Sheeran and Chris Stapleton among others.
She also added a link leading to pre-orders for the Red (Taylor’s Version) album that came with a surprisingly small number of formats – two versions of the album as a download (in “clean” and “explicit” editions) and two versions on CD (ditto). No vinyl. No cassettes. No bank-busting bundles like she has done in the past. Those extra formats are bound to be added as part of the follow-up marketing. There are still three months until the album is out and it is unlikely she or her team will leave out any sales opportunity between now and then.
Note: As we were going to press, Swift joined TikTok (which is very much A Big Deal) and used the excuse to announce the pre-sale for the vinyl edition. Just another example of her maximum impact marketing.
The original video with the clues had over 5m views and over 147k retweets within the first week which suggests that taking the subtle road does not always deliver the same results compared to taking the “LOOK AT THESE CLUES I AM DROPPING FOR YOU” approach.
