Reinventing Media in the Music Industry

Record label AWAL was set to release How I’m Feeling, the debut album from singer/songwriter Lauv on March 6th, 2020. While consumers/fans may have heard Lauv’s music on the radio and streaming platforms he was not a household name. Ciceron leveraged Lauv’s vivid album creative in a robust digital, Connected TV, and OOH strategy to help connect the dots between his music and him as an artist to have his debut album to “chart” on Billboard.

Objective:

Create artist awareness and connect Lauv’s music to new fans, at a time when the entire music industry was re-imagining how to engage with consumers.

Solution:

With understanding Lauv’s audience persona and brand partnerships, Ciceron developed a multi-data source approach that activated on the following:

Fan CRM data that targeted Lauv’s core fans and was utilized to create lookalikes
Geo-location data that targeted shoppers at Forever21 where Lauv had a partnership in place and visitors were exposed to his music while shopping
Persona data that was collected and activated from the Resonate platform on the audience profile of his ideal fan
Out-Of-Home Remarketing that targeted a user via digital media channels that was exposed to the out-of-home ad

This strategy included the execution of data across multi-channels by leveraging Liveramp as a handshake to transfer the data. In addition, Ciceron hacked the wall-garden data from Spotify’s video views by remarketing to this audience within The Trade Desk to increase the artist’s exposure. Lastly, Ciceron activated a programmatic OOH strategy that included billboards, malls, and rideshares that included device remarketing that funneled into the digital strategy to married OOH with digital and Connected TV.

Purchasing media this way allowed the Ciceron team to closely monitor performance on these platforms and optimize in real-time. This resulted in a launch campaign that was not only precisely targeted and incredibly agile, but also in the words of our AWAL client, “reinvented the advertising wheel for the music industry. The folks at Ciceron are incredibly digitally savvy, and I am a better digital marketer for having worked with them.”

Results:

When it came to the results, the numbers spoke for themselves:

100M global streams in the first week
How I’m Feeling Album Peaked #4 on independent albums
How I’m Feeling Album Peaked at #16 on Billboard top 200
Modern Loneliness Single 23rd on mainstream top 40
“Lauv is the top emerging act in the U.S. for the first time, as the San Francisco-based pop singer-songwriter jumps from No. 6 to No. 1 on Billboard’s Emerging Artists chart (dated June 9).” — Billboard