Goals
Korean-American singer-songwriter Eric Nam released his album There and Back Again on January 7, 2022. The goal of the campaign was to increase awareness of the album release, grow the artist’s social media presence, and strengthen the artist’s existing community.
There and Back Again charted #3 in the US for Top New Artist Albums and acquired a total of 3.3M worldwide streams in the first week of its release. The top markets were the United States (US), Canada (CA), Germany (DE), United Kingdom (UK), and India (IN).
Tactics
Our marketing, video services, CRM, advertising, publicity, and sales teams got together to create creative content, strategy, collect data, run promotional efforts, etc. to to prep for this album launch.
Digital Marketing
The Digital Marketing team worked with Eric and his team to establish an original challenge on TikTok, as well as following a general best practice of dueting fans that post utilizing his sounds. We optimized on the popular harmony challenge TikTok trend and Eric launched his version in conjunction with the “I Don’t Know You Anymore” release. We saw an increase in engagement and in partnerships, so our sales team were able to lock in a TikTok Live to promote Nam’s single “Any Other Way” which acquired over 68K unique viewers along with a sounds banner!
Eric used the focus track, “Lost On Me” as the foundation of his TikTok campaign. All of these TikTok marketing initiatives for each track were amplified using advertising spend.
The team also helped Eric explore other platforms. We partnered with Stationhead to celebrate Eric’s birthday for a fan album listening party. The Stationhead app allowed for Eric to speak to his fans, stream the album, and celebrate his birthday.
The team launched a Tunespeak campaign, where 20 winners had the option to select a prize of either: 2 VIP tickets to a tour show of their choice or, if they are unable to attend a show, a signed merch bundle. Tunespeak runs based off of a point system, the more “action items” a fan completes, the more points they will earn. Those with the most points at the end of the campaign will be contacted for their prize. Some of the “action items” as mentioned above consist of: following on socials, subscribing to YouTube Channel / video views, streaming and/or following on DSPs, etc. Eric’s campaign outperformed comparable artists in almost every regard.
Eric participated in a Twitter Spaces on release day to chat about the album. Twitter Spaces are where live audio conversations happen directly with your fans. Eric was able to have fans join into the conversation and chat with him live. 20.5K fans tuned in.
The team’s Livestream Strategy was to notify and direct as many of Eric’s fans as possible to his YouTube Livestream, so he went live on Instagram around 11:10pm, solely with a note (as seen in the example to the right). The strategy behind this is that going live on IG sent a notification to all of Eric’s followers. Those who clicked into the livestream would then see the note and then knew to go to the YouTube premiere link and watch the livestream. It’s a good way to “blast” out a reminder. This was also beneficial because the livestream link redirected to the official music video following. Once fans were in the livestream, they would be in the correct spot to watch the video premiere.
The Digital Marketing, Sales, and Creative teams worked with Eric to piece together an Apple Music Motion Graphic. The B-Roll content was selected from Eric’s most recent music videos and compiled into a quality graphic.
The Digital Marketing team created an official GIPHY page for Eric. Additionally, we have created, uploaded, and appropriately tagged a wide variety of gifs from the music videos he has released throughout the campaign roll-out. We had a total of 39 Stickers and over 688K views. Each of the gifs have been appropriately tagged, optimized, and source linked to their respective music video.
After the release Eric and team tapped into their well-established Community Text Line to ask fans about their thoughts on the album and encourage them to post/chat on socials about their favorite tunes. In terms of Influencer Marketing, Eric is going to kick off his TikTok campaign, utilizing “Lost On Me” as the primary sound. For album release, Eric utilized the focus track, “Lost On Me” as the foundation for his TikTok campaign, which he kicked off on release day. The focal point for this campaign was focused on the lyric of, “everything about you now is bittersweet”. Instead of taking the meaning of it as it is in the context of the song, Eric decided to make a more literal sense of the phrase. He started off with eating a full lemon and tried not to react. Eric then encouraged others to try the same, and duetted those who participated. In efforts to encourage overall fan engagement, increase streams and grow Eric’s email list, we ran a Fan Card activation post release in assistance with our CRM team. Fans were prompted to save “There and Back Again” in order to sign up for their #NamNationRank.
We collected data from 2/25/22 – 3/18/22 and sent out the first round to 6.7K entrants. We then collected data for another 3 weeks and sent out the second round of fan cards on 4/8/22 to just under 10.5K entrants.
College Marketing
Throughout Eric Nam’s release cycle, The Orchard’s College Marketing team hopped in to support his singles “I Don’t Know You Anymore” and “Any Other Way,” as well as the full album, There And Back Again. For There And Back Again, the Reps participated in Eric’s Lemon Challenge on TikTok. Our Austin Rep’s TikTok received the most views, while our Houston Rep’s Reels totaled over 6K views. Their combined efforts for all three campaigns on TikTok yielded 7400 impressions and their Reels yielded nearly 17K impressions. The total reach across all 3 executed campaigns totals over 50K impressions. At the end of this campaign we compiled all of the efforts into one report, as well as a recap video.
Video Services
Throughout the release cycle, the Video Services team worked to make as much impact on the platform as possible, providing a channel clean-up and consistent posts leading up to the release to ensure fans were engaged and anticipating the album. The posts included vlogs, shorts, official music videos, lyric videos, live performances, community posts, commenting, live-chats, stories, and more! The Video Services team worked to create a unique YouTube premiere experience for the There And Back Again album release party: Ensured all videos either had a music video or a visualizer for the audio release and created playlists, Community/Story assets, Shorts assets, and all videos went live with the audio to aid with SEO.
The YouTube Live Strategy included optimizing the watch pages 12 hours prior to the album drop (including pinned comments, live-chats), promotion across socials and YouTube with a call to action. At 11:15pm EST, Eric went live on YouTube for 45 mins, decorating in frame for an album release party, chatting with fans, playing some of the new music. Prior to the YouTube Live, Eric went live across other platforms such as IG and TikTok, only showcasing a post-it note saying ‘Live on YouTube.’ The YouTube Livestream automatically used the feature live redirect to the official music video premiere at midnight. Super Chats/Stickers were used a lot by fans to help him in ‘decorating’ and celebrating the release.
CRM
Our CRM efforts included collecting emails through the “Pre-Save to Unlock” campaign (brought in over 7k subscribers), seizing the opportunity to increase subscribers once the track was out we changed the “Pre-Save” to a “Save” campaign (brought in over 1.3k subscribers), continuing to grow the list of subscribers we ran an “Any Other Way” Pre-Save to unlock campaign (brought in over 7k subscribers), and created a pop-up form to appear on EricNam.com to which directs fans to sign up for his email list (brought in over 5k subscribers to date).
We also noted significant newsletter growth (43.7+ total subscribers). Eric’s list began in October 2021 and grew to over 21k subscribers. The Orchard Design, Digital Marketing and CRM teams to develop send 6 newsletters promoting new tracks, merch, tour and album. Average open rate: 43.2%.
Advertising
The Advertising team strategy was to amplify the creative strategy set for the release by boosting post ads across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to highlight and increase the great engagement Eric has gotten on his organic posts on these platforms and qualify his music to should-be fans. Complementing these focus platforms, we ran ads across YouTube to promote priority videos, a Spotify Marquee unit to reach existing fans while they are streaming, and Google Search to capture users searching for Eric-related keywords. We saw an above-average 2.53% CTR on Facebook/Instagram activations across all singles and the album release.
This CTR was largely driven by high engagement rates in our related interest and similar artist targeting, indicating that users outside of Eric’s core fanbase resonated well with the album as a whole. We additionally saw a super-efficient $0.31 CPM and $0.03 CPC on TikTok, making our ads a great awareness play as well as an efficient traffic driver. Finally, we drove over 2.2M views on focus videos at a sub $0.005 cost per views, some of the most efficient views we have driven in the last year.
Advertising on TikTok:
We also used ad spend to amplify TikTok marketing activations, including Eric’s “I Don’t Know You Anymore” text challenge, “Any Other Way” whistle post, and “Lost On Me” lemon challenge. Ad campaigns resulted in over 23,000 followers, over 455,000 paid likes, over 10 million impressions, and over 98,000 clicks. Average click through rate across all campaigns throughout the album rollout was around 0.9%, above the TikTok benchmark of 0.75%. It’s worth noting that getting users to take actions leading off platform can be difficult on TikTok, so these campaigns were particularly effective.
Advertising on AudioMob:
The Orchard Ads team worked with AudioMob on this release, an advertising partner that serves non-skippable audio ads while users are gaming on mobile devices. The targeted users aged 18-24 in the United States within the pop, dance & electronic genres.
Campaigns are booked on a guaranteed CPM (Cost per thousand). However, this campaign over-delivered by 195%, resulting in a significantly more efficient CPM than expected, giving us a ton of added value through the campaign. It served 192,775 impressions and 2,731 clicks, resulting in a 1.42% average click through rate. It’s worth noting that throughout the campaign, click through rate more than doubled, suggesting that repeated exposure to ads resulted in more clicks.
Publicity
The Orchard’s in-house publicist Michael Tomczak locked in over 34 press opportunities for Eric at both lifestyle and music publications THERE AND BACK AGAIN EDITORIAL SUPPORT: PAPER, NPR, Glamour, MTV News, BuzzFeed, WIRED, Seventeen Magazine, Ones to Watch, WNYC, NME, Entertainment Tonight, Teen VOGUE, Consequence, Coveteur, EUPHORIA, 1883 Magazine, Rolling Stone (India) – & more!
Additionally, high profile video features were secured with the following:
BuzzFeed Celeb: Eric Nam Reads Thirst Tweets (Part Two) [2.3 million views]
WIRED: Eric Nam Answers the Web’s Most Searched Questions [933k views]
Cosmopolitan: K-Pop star Eric Nam is a Wig Expert!? Expensive Taste Test [310k views]
GQ: Eric Nam’s $1.1M Shopping Spree [280k views]
Genius: “I Don’t Know You Anymore” Official Lyrics & Meaning [108k views]
Seventeen Magazine: Eric Nam Reveals His Celeb Crush and Sends a Message to His Fans | 17 Questions [135k views]
Glamour: Eric Nam Watches Fan Covers on YouTube [125k views]
The Zach Sang Show: Eric Nam Talks “There And Back Again”, Kpop vs. Pop, Relationships & More [81k views]
BuzzFeed Celeb: Eric Nam Ranks His Songs [75k views]
Teen VOGUE: Eric Nam Creates the Playlist of His Life [51k views]
MTV News: Eric Nam on ‘There and Back Again’ & What He’s Learned About Himself [4k views]
NBC New York: ‘There And Back Again’ With Eric Nam | New York Live TV [1k views]
Sales
The Sales team recorded Chart & Week 1 Performance Highlights – US Week 1 Charting: #3 Top New Artist Albums, #9 Current Digital Albums, #21 Record Label Independent Current Albums, #25 Heatseekers, #27 Current Pop Albums
Global First Week Streaming / Downloads:
- Charting
- Peaked at #1 on Apple Music’s K-Pop albums chart
- Peaked at #3 on iTunes’s Top Pop Albums chart
- Achieved #3 on Spotify’s Top Albums Debut Chart in the USA
Results
Total Streams: 3.33M WW – US (1.45M)
Overview Album Stats: 4.6 Mil Album views, 575k Avg. Album Video View, & 55k total playlist plays
Social Growth in 1 year:
Spotify +568k (+58%)
Instagram +446k (+13.4%)
TikTok +501k (+63%)
YouTube +150k (+20%)
Twitter +135k (+9%)
