Even though A$AP Rocky’s debut album “Long Live A$AP” leaked almost a month before the official release date, he still managed to land a number one spot on the charts. How was he able to fight through a tough situation and still end up selling 139,000+ copies? I think this marketing campaign as well as other initiatives taken by his camp might have helped ensure the successful release of the album. Check out some details below:
For the launch of the album currently at the top of the Billboard 200 – A$AP Rocky’s debut, Long.Live.A$AP – Chicago-based digital production firm Eyes & Ears Entertainment orchestrated a creative digital campaign. Powered by a mix of web-based services, fans are able to call A$AP Rocky and leave him a voicemail, “chop and screw” that voicemail to make it sound like it might on an A$AP Rocky track, and unlock exclusive content in the process.
Through friends, or A$AP himself, fans who discovered the campaign’s landing page are prompted to simply pick up the phone and leave a voicemail at 786-501-ASAP. Only by leaving a voicemail does the caller’s phone number become the key to unlock a video of Rocky himself giving praise to his fans for purchasing the album.
Brian Schopfel, co-founder at Eyes and Ears entertainment (E&E), explains that the idea for the campaign was built from the ground up with Rocky’s fan’s demographic in mind. “Mobile is very important,” he says. “Over 30% of A$AP Rocky’s website traffic is through mobile and it accounts for a significant portion of users’ time on the site. After we built A$AP Rocky’s main site, RCA came to us with a blank slate and asked for us to come up with an idea, so we thought it would be cool for fans to just call him and then to collect mobile numbers, which was one of the label’s goals. Rocky is an off-the-cuff guy, and ultimately we wanted to recreate that.”
To make the idea work, Eyes and Ears utilized cloud communications service Twilio, SoundCloud, and an experimental web protocol known as Web Audio API in order to seamlessly record caller’s voicemails and upload them to the web. Keith Hoffmann of E&E explained:
“We use Twilio to accept incoming calls and manage the phone numbers. From there, Twilio sends the call data to our servers where we respond with voicemail actions (menus, messages, and recording voicemails) with Twilio’s own XML spec – TwiML. Twilio and our servers talk back and forth in that way until users leave a voicemail. Twilio captures the call and records it into a WAV file on the fly.”
Props to Billboard & AlLindstrom
