How we helped a band attribute consumption to specific marketing activity and optimize ad spend
Updated: Dec 19, 2022
OVERVIEW
We Came As Romans had a new album, “Darkbloom,” dropping on Sharptone Records on 10.14.22, and their goal was to make it their biggest release yet. They brought on Hyperculture Marketing Group to run all digital & paid media campaigns, and hired Immensity to analyze data surrounding previous paid
campaigns and identify which ones were driving the most consumption.
“Attributing growth in streaming consumption back to paid media has always been a bit of a black hole in data / marketing analytics, as there are currently no ways to create custom conversions to trigger around consumption feeding back to the point of discovery.”
- David Puckett, Founder & CEO, Hyperculture Marketing Group
APPROACH
STEP 1 Import paid campaign data from the last 12 months across 6 different channels - Google Ads, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. Came out to ~60 campaigns, and ~5-10 metrics for each campaign such as paid impressions, CTR, CPC and so on.
STEP 2 Process all data with Immensity’s data engine, leveraging advanced statistics and machine learning to identify any possible correlative or causal
relationships that might exist between various campaign and streaming metrics, measure how much predictive power each campaign dataset has on consumption, and measure/compare “lift” in consumption during each campaign period.
STEP 3 Aggregate, weight, and distill all information down into simple insights. Insights included:
- 2 TikTok campaigns (the only 2 in the entire data pool) were in the top 3 when it comes to biggest impact on streaming metrics
- Ad spend on TikTok, a small fraction of what was spent on other platforms
- Strong results also surrounding sequencing campaigns on YouTube
- Results surrounding Meta campaigns were moderate,
results surrounding Twitter were weak
“Reporting for DSP campaigning is typically limited to “vanity metrics,” like CTR & CPC. While we had a strong hunch & belief that paid media on a specific platform was driving higher consumption, even though the vanity metrics were slightly more expensive, we needed confidence to pivot the budget accordingly.”
- David Puckett, Founder & CEO, Hyperculture Marketing Group
WHAT THEY DID
- Shut off Twitter ads and reallocated to TikTok and YouTube Sequencing
- Reallocated ~25% of Meta budget to TikTok and YouTube
Sequencing
- Overall increase ad spend on TikTok >200%
RESULTS
After increasing TikTok ad budget
by 200%
- HIT HIGHEST SPOTIFY MONTHLY LISTENER COUNT EVER
2M+
- NEW SONG FROM ALBUM WENT VIRAL ON TIKTOK
- HIT 32M ALBUM STREAMS (USA) IN FIRST WEEK MORE THAN ANY
PREVIOUS RELEASE
- 28,196 TOTAL CONSUMPTION IN FIRST WEEK MORE THAN ANY
PREVIOUS RELEASE
- STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT INCREASE IN TIKTOK’S IMPACT VALUE ON
STREAMING DATASET
- STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT GROWTH IN SPOTIFY MONTLY LISTENERS, FOLLOWERS AND STREAMS COMPARED TO PREVIOUS ALBUM
CONCLUSION
POSITIVE RETURN ON INVESTMENT
WCAR’s goal = achieved
Immensity Insights = correct
Hyperculture’s marketing
strategy = success
Attributing growth in consumption and revenue to marketing campaigns and
activities on other platforms requires proper, modern data science, and Immensity is the only system providing this type of technology artists,
labels, other types of creators and teams.
“Immensity was able to not only bring clarity to the consumption data to confirm the hypothesis, but saved both Hyperculture, the label & management team immense amounts of time by providing their proprietary analytics to the
campaigns. The return on investment here was unbelievably clear, and our only regret was not being connected with Immensity at an earlier date around the start of the album release campaigning!”
- David Puckett, Founder & CEO,
Hyperculture Marketing Group
GOING FURTHER WITH IMMENSITY
The same type of analysis can be performed to measure and predict the impact specific marketing campaigns/platforms will have on audience growth, fan engagement, as well as ticket and merch sales!!
APPENDIX
We Came As Romans is an American metalcore band from Troy, MI. After forming in 2005 they have released 6 studio albums - 4 on Equal Vision Records and more recently 2 on SharpTone Records, several of which have hit the top 10 on the US Indie Chart, including “Tracing Back Roots” (2013) which peaked at number 1. They have headlined and supported on tours all across the world with bands like Parkway Drive, Megadeath, Bullet for my Valentine, and many more. They currently have ~1.9M monthly listeners on Spotify, 227K followers on Instagram, and 1.4M followers on Facebook.
Hyperculture Marketing Group, founded by David Puckett, is an omni-channel marketing agency that specializes in data consolidation, data segmentation, CRM implementation & paid media / performance marketing for artists, labels, management companies, and various other clients across multiple industries. Their client list includes Alicia Keys, Motley Crue, Five Finger Death Punch, Megan Thee Stallion, 300 Entertainment, Better Noise, Ice Nine Kills, Shinedown, Papa Roach + dozens more. They were brought on to handle all digital & paid media for the WCAR album release.
Immensity is an intelligent marketing analytics system. The platform can automatically pull in publicly available data from ~20 different social media platforms and DSPs, and makes it easy for clients to import non-publicly available data like streaming consumption, paid digital marketing, or sales data. From there, the system leverages multiple layers of advanced statistics and machine learning to analyze an artist’s dataset and identify which platforms, and which activities or campaigns are actually making the biggest impact on digital audience growth, fan engagement, consumption, and sales.
Their client list includes some of the largest independent record labels and organizations in the music industry like APG and The Cleveland Orchestra, and they have performed analysis surrounding numerous influential catalogs like Boyz II Men, Parkway Drive, as well as many other major pop stars and legacy artists.