With billions of streams, millions of followers and more than 15 million monthly listeners, it’s safe to say that Dan + Shay’s new album release was a highly anticipated one. In celebration of the new album – titled “Bigger Houses” – Spotify was looking to hype up the release with something they knew the duo’s global fans would love: exclusive content starring their faves.
The team’s goals included generating awareness around the new album and the pre-save options available on Spotify, creating the opportunity for fun conversations among fans and followers in line with the bespoke creative content, and driving traffic to Dan + Shay’s new album.
After meeting with Dan + Shay’s team, it was clear that the duo’s chemistry and humor should be front and center. So, we took inspiration from their album title… and took our creative in the opposite direction. They’re singing about Bigger Houses, so we put them on a miniature set.
In a gamified version of a tracklist reveal, we sourced dozens of tiny objects, each representing a song - or lyric inside a song - off the new album (with a few whammies included to possibly throw them off,) with one of the guys drawing a song name to illustrate with selected objects, and the other having to guess.
Still inspired by the meaning of the album’s title track, we also had Dan + Shay play a few fortune-telling rounds of M.A.S.H. (you know, Mansion, Apartment, Shack or House?) to relive some of that playground magic and look into the duo’s future, answering questions like where they’ll live, what kind of car they’ll drive, which of the songs from the new album will top most listeners’ Wrapped, which will be the most played at weddings, etc.
We were able to maximize our time on set by leveraging the space for a portrait shoot, behind-the-scenes photos, and a recorded broadcast interview with Extra, which aired in primetime a week after our shoot. While in promotion of the new album, the segment highlighted Spotify’s content capture with Dan + Shay, and also announced the group’s upcoming gig on NBC’s The Voice as the show’s first-ever coaching duo. The portraits we took were utilized for out-of-home advertising, including Spotify’s billboard placements in Nashville, Times Square and other promotional images, with our behind-the-scenes coverage living on the brand’s social channels, sharing a peek into their day on set with fans.
Oh, but the artists did give us one very specific bit of direction: #FDCC3D. Dan + Shay wanted to somehow incorporate the exact shade they were using for all creative surrounding the new album, so we took their hex code and painted the entire cyc set in Bigger Houses Yellow for the day.
Our Bigger Houses campaign videos garnered a total of 255k views on Instagram, approximately 182% more views than views of videos posted in the previous 90 days (previously averaging around 45k views per video). Engagements also far outpaced the channel’s benchmark from that summer, with likes on each video hitting nearly 3x the likes seen on videos from the previous 90 days.
The additional levers we pulled on set resulted in even more impressions, with the Extra segment earning 560k broadcast views at its airing, and nearly 600k impressions coming from traditional media pickup of our campaign and shoot.
In its first week on Spotify, Bigger Houses garnered 4.9M streams, occupying 38% of streamshare in the market. Bigger Houses has racked up more than 50M streams since the album launched. Hope there’s enough square footage to house all those spins.
