CASE STUDY: PINK FLOYD THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON 50th ANNIVERSARY BOOK
BRIEF
To mark 50 years since the release of Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side Of The Moon, Thames & Hudson published a special edition book of the same name. The hardback photography book, in square format like the original vinyl, featured rare and unseen photographs as well as drawings from the album artwork by Hipgnosis.
Marketing this book involved working closely with Pink Floyd management and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell as Pink Floyd’s art director. The book would also form part of Warner Music’s anniversary deluxe Box Set, so our campaigns would be synchronised where possible.
The strategy was to get Pink Floyd fans who have a nostalgic feel for the album to buy the book by focusing on the ‘behind-the-scenes’ nature of the rare and unseen photography.
CAMPAIGN
Given the established audience for the band, the music label was relying heavily on the online community to drive organic sales of the Box Set. This would take precedence over the book’s marketing. Once the Box Set was launched, the Pink Floyd social media channels with a combined following of 32.7 million would help promote the book.
Taking advantage of the early Box Set promotion, a Google Search campaign ran for four weeks. Driving traffic to shopping carts this supported the book’s publicity activity and further ATL activity later on. There were 31, 049 impressions with a CTR of 4.34%.
Simultaneously, the book was available for pre-orders on Amazon where a targeted AMS campaign ran for four weeks targeting other Pink Floyd, Roger Waters and genre titles. At its height the book charted at #1 in Vocal & Singing, #2 in Celebrity Photography, #18 in Rock Music.
One of the key aspects of the campaign was to produce a piece of content that could be used on social media, and would appeal to the Pink Floyd fan that has seen countless communications over the past 50 years. As book sales continue long after the publishing date, having a long-lasting presence on Thames & Hudson’s YouTube would also be benficial.
We worked with Aubrey Powell to produce a short promotional video with photographer Jill Furmanovsky discussing her pictures from the book combined with on-brand animation and a Pink Floyd soundbed. This was set to premiere on the publication day along with scheduled social posts and solus newsletter to Thames & Hudson subscribers, which resulted in 10,200 opens and 591 clicks.
In addition to the video content I created a Spotify ad to run for two weeks from publication day. This targeted both Pink Floyd and rock music genre fans. Having edited the soundbed and drafting the script, it was developed further with Pink Floyd management before going live. This campaign over-delivered 879,565 impressions, with a reach of 328,459 and a CTR of 0.10%.
While the social media content, Amazon, Google Search and Spotify ads were running there was a print ad running consecutively in two issues of MOJO magazine (two months). With a readership of 67,435 per issue, this provided a longer lasting presence for the book adding a higher attention rate to the campaign.
RESULT
Total sales: 65% achieved in first six months.
BACK