3 – audience poll, gathering input from fans, direct audience interaction
4 – link to merchandise, appealing to fans allowing the band to be represented as part of their identity
5 – ARG, coded message encouraging fans to start decoding and working out a mystery
6 – online livestream promotion, charity event, teaser encouraging fans to take part
7 – 30 second cli[ of music video, teaser, continuing cryptic codes
8 – distorted audio message, a new kind of code for audience to unscramble, to keep their attention and engagement
9 – response to poll results, gives audience satisfaction that their opinion is heard and the artist is working in response to that to give them the products they want
10 – album reveal, links to streaming platforms to be the first to listen to the release
I’m happy with how we’ve managed to build a strong narrative and pull off the idea of an ARG for our audience, a unique and engaging marketing technique. We installed good brand consistency with the use of consistent colours, fonts and filters in the imagery, as well as using a consistent cipher in our mystery text posts.
In future I’d like to spend more time developing the ARG elements however, to make them feel more rewarding to find and decode, maybe including elements and clues within the digipak design or tour poster, so everything feels a bit more interconnected.
To begin preparing to put our page together, we compiled our post ideas in this slideshow, highlighting what we want featured in each post and why. In summary, the overarching idea for our page is to create an alternate reality game (ARG) alongside our album promotion, creating an interactive sort of treasure hunt/mystery that our audience is encouraged to solve and engage with. You can see an example of this by the band Twenty One Pilots, in June 2020 they organised a similar interaction to promote their single “Level of Concern”. However we also aim to draw from what we learnt from analysing another social media page too, merging the two sides of release promotion and narrative reflective of the two characters seen in our music video.
In order to approach creating our own social media page we took some time to analyse a page by a related artist, picking up on key ideas and techniques they used.
In preparation for our own page, it was important we got an idea of the conventions and fitting terminology by identifying them within in another artists (with a similar audience)’s page.
