OUGD504 - Brief 4 - Campaign Analysis

OUGD504: Brief 4: SONY music / ONLY studio Brief

Campaign Analysis


The next stage in my research was to analyse a range of music campaigns to understand how bands have engaged and audience and created a successful buzz surrounding the release of their latest albums. This would allow me to further understand techniques in which bands target their audience to promote their new releases. I feel this research will give me a much better understanding of music campaigns and will provide me with inspiration of how I can create an engaging digital campaign for The Japanese House. 

5 seconds of summer created an elaborate digital platform consisting of two retro games that created a truly engaging and immersive experience for the user. They also created 3D gifs and hosted their own fan convention to further push their album ultimately naming them as the biggest breakthrough artist of the year. The results of this campaign were truly impressive with over 40,000 purchases within the first 24 hours of launch and 500,000 entries to attend the fan convention. This highlights how effective a digital campaign can be when marketing appropriately at the target audience. I feel the success of this campaign largely is largely attributed to the digital awareness of the target audience allowing them to fully immerse themselves within the features of the campaign. 

Taylor Swifts campaign for the release of her album encouraged fans to purchase physical product to receive unique codes that would win them meet and greets, merchandise and tickets to the upcoming world tour. The 7 day period of the campaign added a sense of urgency and upped the hype surrounding the release of the album. The results saw over 175,000 physical CD code sales inputted showing a huge jump in sales during the first week of release. The unique codes engaged fans and saw a significant increase in sales in order to win prizes, the digital element of inputting codes was a great way to collate data allowing the marketing campaign to measure the success of the campaign much more accurately to then apply to future campaigns.

Ed Sheeran moved away from a solely digital campaign incorporating more personal factors into his campaign. He featured in a Global Q&A with youtube that received over 40,000 questions and trended globally. He performed 3 gigs in one day across multiple locations in the UK, released instant great tracks on the days leading up to the album launch and featured in an interactive TV campaign. This campaign was so extensive due to the large budget of £25,000+ however the success is reflected in this as the campaign generated over 2 million album pre-orderes as well as creating a serious hype around the album across a range of platforms such as TV, twitter and the internet.

Paloma Faith targeted a more specific audience within her marketing campaign she invited artists fans and illustrators from around the world to create their own interpretation of her album allowing them to feel connected to the artist add their personal views to the album. This campaign worked well demonstrating how a small budget can still be effective in creating a buzz surrounding the album and can be successful. The results of this campaign included 465 submissions and increased her social media following by over 88,000 followers across social media and tracked clicks on her music exceeded 15m across the campaign.

This research has given me a far better understanding of music campaigns how these can appeal to the artists target audience to create a buzz surrounding the new release of music. The campaigns analysed varied in terms of approach and budget however were all determined to be successful, I found the majority of the campaigns used social media to push the release and as a key way for fans to share and connect with the campaign. I will take this information and apply it to the generation of my own campaign. These examples have inspired me to look outside the obvious of just promoting the music as these campaigns extend form this finding unique way to appeal to the target audience and creative inventive immersive experiences for the user that builds genuine excitement surrounding the release of their favourite artists music.