Music Industry Swipe File: November 2018
Social Media Ads from Mariah Carey, Michael Bublé, and Little Mix
If you’re going to write an article about music industry advertising around the holidays, you might as well go big, right? That’s why this month’s Music Industry Swipe File features two of the biggest holiday music artists — Mariah Carey and Michael Bublé. Of course, they both released albums in November ahead of their holiday popularity bump. Plus, I take a look at Little Mix’s ecommerce strategy during their transition from Syco Music to Columbia Records.
This is the third Music Industry Swipe File article, you can check out September and October.
A few people have asked me what “Swipe File” means, thinking I came up with the term or that it has something to do with the swiping touch-gesture. Neither are true. Historically, a swipe file is a portfolio of previous advertising campaigns and assets that an agency uses for reference for future campaigns. My goal with the Music Industry Swipe File is to make a record of what social media ads and digital campaigns agencies and labels are running on behalf of well-known artists and make that information available to everyone. Hopefully, artists and labels with more limited resources can take some learnings from this series and apply them to their own marketing campaigns.
Little Mix — Ecommerce Strategy
My favorite part of looking at an artist’s social media ads isn’t so much the creative that they’re using (although that is hugely important), it’s looking at where that ad is sending traffic and what the objective of the ad is. Largely, I find that the ads themselves are great, but the landing page and the following steps of the customer journey leave something to be desired from a marketing perspective. This is a good example of that.
Little Mix have been running a carousel ad on Facebook and Instagram for their merch store. This is a great approach for artists that have a variety of merchandise items. Facebook even allows you to optimize by putting the most-clicked-on carousel item first.
Clicking on this ad takes you to the Little Mix store, hosted by BSI Merch. Hold onto that. The hosting company is important later on.
The store is clean, modern, and looks good on mobile. It also includes a “This webstore uses cookies” opt-in disclaimer; very important for a company serving European customers. That disclaimer is (in part) for the information that the embedded Facebook pixel is collecting.
As traffic goes through the store, it will trigger events to occur which will then segment the traffic depending on how much they’ve engaged with the website.
The events are indicated by the yellow exclamation mark triangles in the screenshot. In the order that traffic will go through them:
- PageView (view any page in the store)
- ViewContent (view any store item page)
- AddToCaty
- InitiateCheckout
- AddPaymentInfo
- Purchase
By segmenting traffic based on where they get in this funnel, Little Mix’s marketing team can serve ads on Facebook and Instagram to people who added an item to their cart but did not check out (abandoned cart). Or identify the low-hanging fruit and directly target people who got all the way to add payment info but never purchased.
Unfortunately, there is one glaring flaw here. That is not Little Mix’s Facebook pixel. That pixel belongs to BSI Merch. Remember the ecommerce platform I mentioned earlier?
How do I know this? I looked at other merch stores hosted by BSI (Motorhead, Hinds, Trailer Park Boys, and more). All of the stores use the same Facebook pixel.
Why does this matter? This means that Little Mix doesn’t have direct access to their fan data. BSI has access to Little Mix’s fan data. BSI has access to Facebook data for all artists that use their platform.
This is not wildly uncommon. If you go on Amazon and buy a Little Mix album, Amazon will cookie your browser. So what’s the difference? If you buy something on Amazon, you know you’re on Amazon. If you buy something from BSI’s Little Mix store, you think you’re on Little Mix’s ecommerce store. The website is even shop.littlemix.com! This is extremely deceiving to fans and not artist friendly.
I’m going to make an assumption that one of two things is happening here.
- BSI offers marketing services. In order to use that retargeting information that the Facebook Pixel is collecting, you may need to pay BSI’s marketing team to use it.
- Little Mix’s marketing team failed to catch this, and they did not request for their own pixel to be added or for BSI’s pixel to be removed.
Either way, seeing fan data handled this way is disheartening. Hopefully, this can serve as a warning to artists that are looking for ecommerce companies to partner with. Build your store on a platform like Shopify that you can control.
Only on the Trailer Park Boys store I do see additional Facebook Pixels (hopefully owned by the TPB team). BSI’s pixel is still on that page.
Mariah Carey — “Caution” Social Media Ads
If you’ve read this far, thank you for nerding out with me. That Little Mix analysis was a deep one. Now, let’s get into the holiday spirit with Mariah Carey.
This November, Mariah Carey was running a whopping 24 different ads in the US across Facebook and Instagram. These consisted of videos, photos, and carousel ads promoting her new album and her tour. See below for a sample of those ads.
Aside from different ad formats, not a ton of variety in copy or creative. A little unremarkable, but I think it’s worth understanding where the bar is set for artists that have a large advertising budget.
For the tour ads, (I hope) they are targeting people that live in the cities that the tour is passing through plus retargeting from their newsletter mailing list and people that have previously purchased tickets. There is nothing worse than serving ads to people that don’t care about them or can’t go to a show even if they wanted to.
And, finally, I can’t do an ad analysis without one snarky “gotcha” moment. The agency screwed up and put “Listen on Amazon Music” in the description of an ad promoting the CD at Target. I know, it’s small…and I’ve made mistakes before…but let’s double check ads before we publish them.
Michael Bublé — New Album
Michael Bublé has a new album out titled “♥️”. No, not “heart”. It’s the heart emoji. Of course, DSPs and probably every industry reporting tool do not recognize emojis as song titles, so it’s called “love” (all lower case) on all streaming platforms. The lengths we’ll go to for the sake of appearing relevant.
I’m nearly definitely not in the right demographic for these ads, so I’ll withold too much judgement on the creative. That said, there are presumably millions of Bublé fans out there and an expensive marketing team was hired to reach them. Let’s see what they did.
The copy for these ads is simple and on brand. Using emojis in copy can come across as cheesy if not done correctly, but when an emoji is the title of your album, well, stick to your guns.
Copy:
The key to ♥️ is to listen.
Michael’s brand new album ♥️ is out now!
http://michaelbuble.lnk.to/love
Here are the videos Bublé was using in his ads:
I use gifs for embedding video ads because they’re easy to upload to Medium. Usually, it’s annoying that I can’t show the music in a video ad, but for this one, it’s a blessing in disguise. When Bublé kisses the screen in the above video, there is an extremely overemphasized kissing sound — probably from a sound effect library — that is pretty cringy. The below video just features one of his songs in the background.
I’m going to assume the above creative works and gets people to click the link in the ads. When people do click on the link in the copy, the get taken to a LinkFire pivot page.
I’ve talked about pivot pages before, and I’m not a big fan. Keep an eye out for an upcoming article specifically about the pros and cons of pivot pages. That said, here’s what’s going on with this pivot page:
Traffic is sent to the pivot page where they can click through to the DSP or retailer of their choice. They are also tracked at multiple stages in this funnel. The location, device, and anonymized Facebook ID (and associated data) is tracked when someone lands on the page. Their platform of choice is also recorded when they click through. This is great for understanding audiences and building retargeting lists.
The downside is that pivot pages are absolutely devoid of any branding or soul and have notoriously high bounce rates. But more on that to come in a future article.
There are a lot of pixels on the LinkFire page See the screenshots below for a sample of what’s being tracked on the page.
All of these pixels are essentially doing the following: collecting basic data on who is going to the page, what platform they click to, and building retargeting audiences based on this information so that the marketing team can serve more relevant ads to those fans in the future. Bublé’s team is using some expensive programs like Oracle’s BlueKai and Adobe’s Marketing Cloud. But for labels and artists with smaller budgets, the proprietary Facebook and Google products will do just fine.
Final Thoughts
- The information that is publicly available about these ad campaigns is limited. We can’t see the targeting, we don’t know about any deals between the artists and the platforms, and we don’t know the budgets available to these artists. So while I do voice my opinion about ethics or competencies of marketing teams and platforms at times, there may be a valid response to my criticisms. And if anyone I call out does have a response to what I write, I’ll be happy to update the article with that response.
- One of the great things about advertising on social media is that you can run as many variations on an ad as you like without increasing your budget. Any marketer worth their salt is testing different visual content and different copy within a single ad set. Once you have a big enough sample size, you can determine that a few of those ads are overperforming compared to the others and you can invest the remainder of your budget in the ads that are working. Otherwise, you’re putting all of your budget into an ad that you think will work without having data to back it up.
- When choosing platforms to work with, be conscientious of who gets what data. There are risks with collecting data and there are certain responsibilities with GDPR in effect in Europe. But done correctly, you can use data to create a better fan experience and move toward your business objectives at the same time. Just make sure that whoever is also collecting your fan’s data through your marketing activities has those same values.
That wraps up this month’s Music Industry Swipe File! The next swipe file article will come out in January. I’ve got some other articles coming out soon — an explainer on how I find all of this information on social media ads and an article on pivot pages. Thank you for reading!
Dan Servantes is a marketing consultant at GHStrategic. You can reach him on Twitter (@drservantes) and via this form.
