Editorial ✖ When Bands Meet Brands

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How to build a music strategy

When brands meet bands: top tips for crafting a pitch perfect music strategy

First published on The Drum By Hannah Bowler Senior Reporter

While music and marketing go hand in hand, music fans can be tough to win over, so it's unlikely a brand will succeed in this space without a long-term and wellthought-out strategy.

There have been some exceptional examples of brands showing up in the
music space and you don't have to look very far back on the pages of
thedrum.com for examples of brands-meet-bands:

• Why Ladbrokes is taking the gamble to reposition itself as an entertainment brand

• Bose no longer wants to be a product-first brand and is rooting itself in culture instead

• How this London brewer landed a branding deal with Queens of the Stone Age

• A giant Little Simz stomps the streets of NYC in Vans 3D billboard ad

There is, of course, also the occasional flop and Simon Labbett, founder and creative director of Truant, points to when Apple pre-loaded U2's new album on everyone's iTunes: "Customers saw it as an invasion of privacy, a way of a big brand forcing something on us, 'rock-and-roll as dystopian junk mail' as the Washington Post described it." So, we asked agency experts who have all been involved in executing music strategies on behalf of a brand to reveal their top tips for getting it right.

Here are our top tips (from Simon Labbett, Founder and Creative Director of Truant)

1. Be expansive in your thinking: more than a track on an ad, clearly. Think of music as the most engaging media channel you could hope to have. The right partnership can shape brand perception or even bring a brand back from the dead. Louis Vuitton employing Pharrell is a great example of a brand that has adopted this philosophy. It could have used him for considerably less money in one or two campaigns, but it wanted a deeper, more meaningful relationship.

2. Don't obsess about scale: it's easy to get seduced by the Travis Scott Fornite case study and the 45.8 million kids who saw it. But don't underestimate the intimacy of an artist's relationship with their fans and the loyalty and trust that brings. Music has so many genres and sub-genres that any brand has the ability to micro-target to great effect. It's often the lesser known artists who have fiercely loyal followings. Form a relationship early on and it's not only cost-effective, but you have the potential to grow with them.

3. Know your audience: Seems obvious right? and it should be, but the relationship between a brand, artist and fan has to be symbiotic and it’s all too often mismatched. Get it right and the more you give an audience, the more they’ll want to engage. The brand benefits from the love the audience has, and the artist never loses the credibility it’s built up. It’s about fitting with each other's values and amplifying what you’re both about. Taco Bell seized upon an opportunity to partner with Doja Cat when it ran out of ingredients for its beloved Mexican Pizza, a move that saw the sales of the pizza skyrocket by 900%. But it doesn’t always go to plan, way back in 2014 Apple pre-loaded their iPods with U2’s latest album for free. They thought they were doing a good deed, but they misread the room entirely. Customers saw it as an invasion of privacy, a way of a big brand forcing something on us "rock-and-roll as dystopian junk mail" the Washington Post described it as.