Position Music Changes The Game With Turn-Key Approach
Position Music is not your average music company. You’ve probably heard their placements in some of these iconic film campaigns: Tomb Raider, Wonder Woman, Transformers, Deadpool, The Hobbit—the list goes on. Their TV resume is no different, with Grey’s Anatomy, Homeland, Big Bang Theory, and that’s just scratching the surface. What initially started as a music library curating and creating (and now most recently, recording in-house) music for television, films, trailers, and advertisements, Position Music has grown into something so much bigger.
Getting your music placed in film and TV is a game-changer in any artists’ career but also one of the most difficult to achieve. There’s so many gatekeepers, decision-makers, and executives who are involved in the journey of getting a song placed, not to mention the competition.
Why not streamline that bureaucratic process and bridge the gap with a fully integrated, artist-centric approach? Position Music saw a deeper need to support artists in all aspects of the media landscape — so it was only natural for them to evolve into a record label and management team, as well.
Paul Crary, Digital Marketing Manager, has been with Position Music for almost a year now. He oversees digital marketing for an expansive artist roster that includes Dead Posey, TeaMarrr, Welshy Arms, and Judah & The Lion, to name a few. In addition to handling A&R, he works with the artists themselves finely tuning their digital release and promotion strategies to help them reach their fans.
No Agency, No Problem
Hailing from a traditional agency background doing social media engagement strategy at advertising powerhouse Periscope, “I was overseeing all the social media for Buffalo Wild Wings. It was crazy — 15 million fans and 24/7 monitoring of the accounts,” says Crary. “It was pretty cool having big budgets. We’ve spent a lot of money on those posts.” When Position Music brought Crary into the mix, they wanted that competency here for their label services.
Without the horsepower of a major advertising agency behind him, “That’s where ToneDen comes in,” Crary says. In the beginning, “We were using the free version with FanLinks…then slowly but surely, I’m like what more could this do?” He started exploring the more premium services that ToneDen had to offer including features that range from Spotify Pre-Saves and the ability to run advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. Although Position Music had never done anything like this before — using a marketing software tool like this— “From there, it was a pretty easy sell,” says Crary.
Crary is not alone—a dedicated ToneDen campaign strategist had trained the entire office on the platform during on-boarding. Everyone has now been empowered to use the tool as well despite the fact for many, digital marketing is not in their realm. “The level of competency in the company is way higher because of ToneDen,” says Crary. “They log in on their own and I hear them in other meetings when I’m not in there bringing up ToneDen—showing how something is doing, [and] who they’re reaching. It puts a smile on my face.”
When it comes to data, Crary is a self-proclaimed nerd. Coming from an agency background, the ability to aggregate and understand the numbers is at its core, the pathway to driving engagement. Along with easy-to-access one-click settlement reports, one of Crary’s favorite features of the platform are the automated daily status reports. Smart performance reporting on any active campaigns are sent to the team’s inbox every day, improving communication amongst the rest of the internal team, the artists’ themselves, and their managers. Everyone’s happy and in the loop. “I didn’t [even] have to do anything,” Crary laughs.
It’s Part Art, Part Science
Cleveland-based alternative rock band Welshly Arms, recently wrapped up No Place Like Home, a 30-day tour across the nation. Working in close collaboration with their management, Crary ran individual engagement ads for every single date of the tour, geo-targeted with custom creative stop-by-stop, through ToneDen.
Using ToneDen’s Creative A/B Testing, Crary was able to test and measure audience data for two different video creatives to promote the tour. The first video was of the whole band encouraging people to come to the shows, and the second video was a live performance.
Based on relevancy scores served by Facebook, variations of audiences and creatives were A/B tested to optimize performance. Higher relevancy scores mean that the people viewing the ads actually found the ad meaningful, leading to more reach.
By re-allocating more ad spend toward the best performing variations of audiences and creative, ToneDen was able to shift their marketing dollar towards the best performing options.
Saving Time Building Audiences
The days of logging into Facebook Ads Manager and manually customizing and managing ads are over: “If you don’t know what’s going on it can be a little jarring. There’s so many options,” says Crary. Throughout all the engagement ads Crary ran—all 47 of them—he made sure to take advantage of ToneDen’s audience building tools. What would have taken a considerably longer time if set-up directly through Facebook Ads Manager, Crary was able to easily customize his audiences— saving him time, hassle, and money.
Targeting Gets Smarter With ToneDen
“The alerts that come in everyday when a change happens is a great way to know that ToneDen is working for you in the background,” says Crary. He got smarter with his targeting through ToneDen’s automatic patent-pending budget optimization “showing you all the different audiences your targeting and moving your money around as the campaign is going.” As the promotion campaign gained steam, with data-driven testing and results driving a lower cost per click, Crary explains that it got to a point “where we were just on autopilot, and spending nicely.”
“A lot of the stops sold-out which was really good for the band. It was a successful tour for Welshy Arms,” Crary reports. “We had a lot of different campaigns running within all these different markets around the United States. It was cool to see it evolve and grow, getting smarter as it went on.”
Aside from the data and AI, there are other details of the platform that stand out to Crary: “I really like the simplicity of ToneDen, but it also has depth. The UI is just amazing—it’s so easy to click-through.” So easy that anyone can use it from A&R, artist management, or label services, to even the artists themselves. “I think the artists are getting more and more curious about ToneDen, which is really cool,” adds Crary. “They want to know what’s going on behind-the-scenes, how it’s working, and what their fans are seeing.”
So much so, that Danyell Souza, Lead Singer of alternative band Dead Posey, is always asking Crary what a Facebook pixel is. Just recently, Crary ran his first contest for the dark-and-raucous band and got a ton of submissions—403 total actions during the two week campaign on ToneDen. Because a fan has to complete a set of actions to enter the contest, their follower growth on social and streaming platforms, such as Twitter and Spotify, increased substantially during that campaign. Crary reports that Dead Posey “really liked it too because fans were constantly hitting them up about it.” With new fans, stronger emotional connections, and huge social media engagement — anything is possible with ToneDen.
Ready to grow your audience and increase engagement with a full technology suite of tools?
The customer support — you are amazing. How quick you respond to us, we have crazy questions all the time. It’s best in class. It’s really nice to know if anything pops up or happens we can email you, chat you, and get in touch really quickly and hear back super fast. That is a huge pro of ToneDen, so thank you.
— Paul Crary, Digital Marketing Manager, Position Music
