Rock Marketing Campaigns

I have split my research into two parts: rock campaigns and drum 'n' bass campaigns. As suggested by the title, this blog will summarise and evaluate my favourite rock campaigns from my research.

In 2019 both Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones were promoted through a marketing campaign. The Rolling Stones were directly involved in theirs, and Led Zeppelin were not. The Rolling Stones campaign revolved around NASA naming a literal rock on Mars after the band to promote their Stones No Filter tour. They recruited Robert Downey Jr to announce this. While this is fun, it is so far out of the realm of what I can achieve that I’ve decided to overlook it. I found it worth mentioning as The Rolling Stones are a key influence of mine.

I found the Led Zeppelin campaign particularly interesting because one of its main aims was to reach beyond Led Zeppelin’s existing audience. The campaign decided to exclude existing Led Zeppelin fans from targeted marketing and instead focused on a younger audience. Instagram’s stories functionality was employed to encourage users to share custom Led Zeppelin playlists.

After this created a new buzz around the band’s catalogue, eight one-to-two-minute animations that explained different stages of the band’s career were released and attracted over 8.5 million views. This lead to a 20% increase in total streams of Led Zeppelin’s songs and, although the campaign was targeting 18-60 year olds, a 21% increase in listeners under 18. This made me especially confident that there is an audience for my project as Jimmy Page, the guitarist of Led Zeppelin, is by the far the biggest influence on my guitar playing.

Another campaign that caught my attention was Greta Van Fleet's 2021 album marketing. Greta Van Fleet are an up-and-coming classic rock band that have been described by some as a Led Zeppelin copy. The campaign employed reddit to interact with its 27 million strong r/Music community. They hosted an “Ask Me Anything” session, where the band created a forum to answer questions posed to them in real-time. An interactive AR filter was released on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, along with regularly posted album art and iconography.

Finally, I discovered a campaign ran by Calva Louise for their 2022 album. This piqued my interest as the campaign released a card game alongside a 45 minute music video for the entire album.

The music video contained a plethora of computer-generated animation and the card game revolved around the world and characters that appeared in the video. This prompted me to think about the utility of physical artefacts to really engage the audience with the brand of an artist.

From this research I realised the value in active engagement with audiences. Rather than publishing content just for viewing, I should release interactive content. This could be as simple as polls and quizzes on social media that users can respond to, or as complex as an interactive video where viewers choose what they want to see happen next. As someone who is obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons, creating an interactive narrative is a particularly attractive idea to me. I also observed that classic rock is much more popular in the US than in the UK. Great Van Fleet’s 2021 album topped three US charts, while only reaching #8 in one UK chart, and 31% of Led Zeppelin’s new listeners in 2019 were based in the US.