We adopted a range of strategies – from local events to social content and digitals tools – to market arguably one of The Beatles’ most eclectic albums and definitely one of the most creatively challenging artworks.
A campaign highlight was taking a literal blank canvas artwork and producing an industry-first enhanced playlist experience for this album on Spotify. This consisted of a series of looped visual assets to accompany audio tracks from the album, interspersed with in-depth interview footage with producers and experts including Giles Martin, Sam Okell and Kevin Howlett. The first of its kind, this truly immersive experience was designed to engage a mobile streaming audience and sustain listening across the entire album which was delivered to streaming services.
This multi-format product included a mass of unheard and unreleased outtakes and acoustic Esher demo versions, alongside the 2018 mix of the album, which gave us a wealth of avenues to explore when it came to marketing cross-platform and cross- demographic. Another first on this project was releasing all three versions of each instant grat track to showcase the breadth of the album and versions available. We took fans back to the studio and created visual representations of band members talking between tracks on the outtakes and also
commissioned brand new, full-length music videos for ‘Glass Onion’ and ‘Back In The USSR’ that premiered with Apple Music and YouTube respectively.
A core theme for this project was the impact and influence of the album and we eventised this discussion with a live stream from YouTube Space in London during release week. The concept saw a panel of current artists, broadcasters and journalists debating with Giles Martin and host Matt Everitt as to “Could The White Album Be Made Today?”. We globalised this moment but taking real-time questions from fans watching live around the world, as well as those in the room.
At the time of writing, this charted at #4 in the UK album charts, the White Album Spotify enhanced playlist has passed 85k followers and accumulated over 3m streams in a week. This activation was an industry first and was successful at bringing to life elements from the physical booklet, as well a shared audio visual experience for historically laid-back streaming audience.
The YouTube live stream has amassed over 150k streams to date and will be edited into digestible segments to be deployed across The Beatles’ other social channels to drive traffic and sustain viewership of the full-length asset. The campaign trailer has smashed 1m views and beyond The Beatles’ undeniable social fanbases, we delivered over 600k impressions to UK cinema-goers in only seven days. Our content and communications plan has so far driven more than 500k clicks to retail and streaming partners overall and is currently tracking at over 15k clicks a day. The tweet to unlock promotion garnered 15m impressions and 150,000 engagements around #BeatlesMarkItFab.
The poster from the original packaging provided a colourful asset from which we produced a brand new promo video for ‘Glass Onion’ which feels fresh and modern. As part of our sustainment plans, we are launching a tool to allow fans to create their own version of the classic poster by plugging in their own social media profiles.
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