Following the global success of ‘Let Her Go’, we knew that Passenger’s fanbase was vast and far-reaching, but despite this he had never had a #1 album, his previous album ‘Whispers’ charted in the UK at #5.

The strategy was built around the question of how to utilise fantastic high-quality audio and visual content to engage his lapsed and broad potential fanbase with the new music.

Being creative with the content allowed us to reach lapsed fans, new audiences, casual fans and dedicated fans across multiple platforms with a global reach. The content consisted of busking tours being streamed live on Facebook, promo videos, bespoke filmed lyric videos, live in the studio videos and cover versions recorded and filmed during the European tour. This all culminated in Passenger’s first ever full-band live performance at London’s Bush Hall on album release day, 23rd September, which was captured by a multi-camera live stream via Facebook for a global album release celebration and has had over 1m views.

This was followed shortly by Passenger’s largest ever headline show in front of 14,000 fans at the Ziggodome in Amsterdam on 26th October, which was the first-ever live music event to be simultaneously live streamed across Facebook, YouTube and Twitter’s Periscope.

The campaign began in mid-June 2016, with Passenger busking in six UK cities ahead of launching his brand new single, ‘Somebody’s Love’, on 17th June, which was premiered by Ken Bruce on Radio 2. Passenger also visited regional radio stations in the cities he was busking to reintroduce himself and warm up stations for his new material.

In the fiercely competitive chart battle week of release Passenger wrote a song about going head to head with Bruce Springsteen for the #1 spot, which he filmed and released on his Facebook. It was widely shared by fans and picked up by NME.com, Rolling Stone and more.

For marketing, we ran a digital campaign exclusively using first-party data. Due to the size and scale of his audience we were able to identify three targeting segments according to depth of engagement and recency. We defined these segments across all key platforms and built out remarketing lists who could be reached at various points in the campaign. We activated these audiences with relevant messaging and creative to ensure we successfully re-engaged lapsed fans while creating maximum buzz and excitement amongst his core fanbase.

We built a content-based sequential strategy to engage the lapsed and casual fans in the build up to the album release. This was integrated with key moments in Passengers’ promotional calendar to capitalise on the organic and non-paid exposure in order to convert these casual fans into the core fanbase.

Digital ran throughout the campaign from announcement through to week of release when we added additional marketing including TV, radio and outdoor to join the dots of the digital campaign plus the great radio, TV and PR exposure as well as a really solid retail campaign for both physical and digital product working with all key partners to achieve high-profile exposure.