When COVID-19 quarantine measures began in March of 2020, the music and entertainment industry was hit especially hard. Millions of Americans went into lockdown and concerts, live events, merch sales, supply chain disruption, and delays in the release of new music all contributed to an anticipated loss of $5 billion in revenue for 2020.
At the same time, record label AWAL was set to release How I’m Feeling, the debut album from singer/songwriter Lauv. While fans may have heard Lauv’s music on the radio and streaming platforms, he was not yet a household name.
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:
Out-of-Home (OOH) media was a tried and true method for announcing new album releases and had served as the cornerstone of the album’s pre-pandemic launch plan. But with stay-at-home measures in place, we were looking at a loss of millions of impressions and ad dollars going unspent.
The Ciceron team quickly pivoted launch efforts away from OOH into other programmatic efforts, using the record label’s own first-party audience data. Partnering with Liveramp, Ciceron was able to load this audience information into our programmatic media buying platform. We were then able to target the audience with distinct album creative and messaging, regardless of where they were on the internet: Facebook & Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, Paid Search, and even more traditionally mass-reach vehicles like Spotify and Connected TV—all deployed with pin-point precision.
Purchasing media this way also 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:
