Marketing lessons learned from two of 2024’s chart-topping albums
Need inspiration for digital marketing campaigns? Look no further than the music industry, which creates some of the most dedicated (and high-converting) fanbases in the world.
Singer-songwriter Billie Eilish and two-man band twenty øne piløts are two great examples. As the summer of 2024 began, their new albums, ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’ and ‘Clancy’, topped the album charts.
We can learn a lot from the strategies behind their album roll-outs, no matter what industry we’re in.
Our very own Lily and Jeeves, who treat the Billie Eilish and twenty øne piløts fandoms like full-time jobs, have written about some of the tricks the artists pulled to top the charts, to help you adopt some of the ideas in your own campaigns.
1. Billie Eilish: everybody’s close friend
A month before Billie Eilish (the icon behind songs you probably know, like ‘Bad Guy’, the James Bond theme ‘No Time to Die’, and the Barbie movie track ‘What Was I Made For?’) dropped her 2024 album ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’, fans opened Instagram to a nice surprise.
A green ring around Billie’s profile picture.
On Instagram, you can add people to your ‘Close Friends’ list, and then upload Stories that only they can see. When you do this, they’ll see a green ring around your avatar.
So you can imagine how excited Billie’s fans were when they saw she’d added them to her Close Friends list.
Plot twist: she added every single one of her followers to Close Friends. More than 100-million people.
Even followers who aren’t actively interested in Billie’s music outside of her big radio hits would have been shocked to see such a huge popstar adding them to her inner circle. Plus: Stories from Close Friends usually appear first.
And the Story, naturally, was promo for Billie’s new album. It was a simple idea, but it worked so, so well.
What we can learn from this
People love feeling special. If the Close Friends approach doesn’t quite work for your brand, look into using Instagram’s Broadcast Channels — or even a regular email newsletter — to share exclusive content.
Think of a narrative angle or a series of offers that makes the secret channel worth checking, but which won’t cause your main public-facing social feeds to become diluted and sparse. Billie’s approach — an exclusive space for occasional ‘big updates’ — could be ideal.
2. twenty øne piløts and their decade-long story
A common adage in the ad industry is: customers have short attention spans.
And in the context of a first-impression, top-of-funnel ad, that’s true. But if you hook the right people and build a rich, engaging story around your brand, that attention span can become infinite.
No band demonstrates this better than twenty øne piløts: two guys who, over the course of six albums, have slowly unravelled a dense, multi-layered story that fans can’t get enough of.
To give you an idea of how complex the narrative can get: just the band’s name alone simultaneously references a 19th-century French war general, a Danish existentialist philosopher, a group of 20th-century French mathematicians, a Broadway play, and the leader of a fictional religion of their own creation.
It’s... a lot.
A still from the incredibly cinematic music video for ‘Paladin Strait’, the final song on ‘Clancy’
And yet, about ten years into the story, thousands of fans were ready to piece together and overanalyse every clue, code, and callback from the moment the band started cryptically teasing their latest album, ‘Clancy’, in early 2024.
What we can learn from this
Customers will let themselves get immersed in complex brand stories. If you’ve got the resources to pull it off, it can be a long-lasting anchor keeping people interested for many, many years.
3. Double albums conspiracies (the art of subtle marketing)
Billie, like twenty øne piløts, has a knack for sneaking hidden messages and subtle hints into her content. The final lyric on ‘Hit Me Hard And Soft’ is:
@missbarbieeilish But when can i hear the next one ?#billie #billieeilish #billieeilishedits #newalbum #finneas #hmhas #applemusic ♬ original sound - 𝖆𝖉𝖗𝖎𝖆𝖓𝖆
“When can I hear the next one?”
When she was asked about the line in an interview, Billie just kinda gave the camera a sly side-eye and didn’t elaborate.
The name of that final track was ‘Blue’, which was also a core colour throughout the album roll-out. But... there were hints of red, too.
The record’s aesthetic ended up being predominantly blue, though, leading fans to theorise that a second half to the album (a ‘double album’) would soon follow, with red theming.
The blue/red dichotomy kept showing up in other places (merch, social graphics, and even Billie’s wardrobe choices). The colours, plus the “When can I hear the next one?” line, had fans convinced about the double album theory.
Something very similar happened in the twenty øne piløts fandom. It started when, on the day ‘Clancy’ was released, the band hosted both an in-person art exhibition and a YouTube livestream.
The art show had a puzzle which, unscrambled, spelled out ‘Clancy Ultimus Capitulus 25’ — Latin for ‘Clancy Final Chapter 25’. Then, on the livestream, Tyler (the band’s singer-songwriter-producer, and creator of much of the group’s lore), while introducing the final song, looked dead at the camera and said:
“Does it sound like the end?”
Then, the song — and its music video — ended on big cliffhangers.
The ‘Clancy Ultimus Capitulus 25’ puzzle also appeared in a 100-page PDF twenty øne piløts released with a special digital version of their album
The fanbase, like Billie‘s, immediately started theorising about a second album. Then, the number ‘25’ started appearing in a bunch more places. Fans have taken to expecting something in June 2025, when the world tour for ‘Clancy’ wraps up.
What we can learn from this
Again, people will get really invested in your story if you tell it well.
But remember: sometimes it’s better to show, not tell. Teasers can be so effective.
Opening a restaurant in a new location? Paste stickers and take out a billboard nearby, with a recognisable but discreet brand mark.
Dropping a new range of products? Style a photoshoot that obscures them with clever lighting or composition, pop a release date over the top, and post.
Social media users are tired of marketing messages being screamed in their faces. An artful dab of subtlety and restraint can go a long way.
4. Immersive experiences and memorable activations
In the run-up to their album drops in May 2024, both Billie and twenty øne piløts had their music added to Fortnite Festival, which, if you’re familiar with Guitar Hero, is essentially the same concept for a new generation.
Billie was also added a fully-playable character in the main Fortnite game, which has millions of daily active players.
Billie Eilish as a playable character in Fortnite
Now, being integrated into the world’s biggest multiplayer game obviously isn’t a move that works for every brand, but...
What we can learn from this
it shows that people will engage with promotional campaigns if they’re genuinely fun and immersive.
For your business, that could be some form of experiential marketing (think: eye-catching brand activations in public or at events), either in the real world or the digital world.
In the fictional world twenty øne piløts have created through their music, there’s a city called DEMA, which they’ve brought to life in a number of ways, e.g. an immersive experience hosted inside Spotify (see the video below), a book of letters from a character fighting to escape the city, and elements of the stage design for their live shows.
Some real-world inspo for restaurants: the Secret Donut Society, a franchise of elusive donut shops in México. You walk into a room (devoid of people), tap in your order on a tablet, and then walk into another deserted room (or should that be desserted?), where your donut will have mysteriously appeared on a small table. Memorable, Instagrammable, and the kinda thing you bring your friends to see.
Some real-world inspo for hotels: in May 2024, Airbnb announced that you’d be able to stay in properties inspired by locations from film and TV, like the balloon-lifted house from Up, the X-Mansion from X-Men, and Headquarters from Inside Out.
Some digital inspo for everyone: if you can’t do elaborate stunt activations in public... fake it! A wave of campaigns dubbed ‘CGI OOH’ (computer-generated out-of-home) took off in 2023 and 2024, creating some genuinely viral moments (Maybelline sticking giant eyelashes on trains and buses, a North Face jacket keeping Big Ben warm, Westeros banners hanging from famous landmarks). People either love them (“this is fun!”), hate them (“fake news!”), or... just straight-up think they’re real (“how’d they get a jacket big enough for Big Ben?!”).
There are simpler options for immersive experiences, too. Branded face filters on Instagram are still a great idea. Make-up lines and fashion labels use them to simulate looks; movie studios make users look like iconic characters; brands with mascots will make the mascots appear beside you. Think up a creative way to use them.
5. Break the rules (with apologies to agency legal teams)
Here’s a fun social media strategy: create a Twitter account, never tweet, and then occasionally block your most loyal customers.
That‘s exactly what twenty øne piløts did. Ready for more wild band lore? Okay, here goes.
There’s a character in the band’s fictional universe nicknamed ‘Blurryface’, who (long story short) is the leader of an oppressive religion which governs the aforementioned city (DEMA).
Back in 2015, before the album ‘Blurryface’ (named after the character) dropped, a Twitter account with the same name appeared. It became an outlet for cryptic teasers.
When the album before Clancy came out, all but one of the account’s tweets were deleted, and then when the Clancy era came around, nothing changed, until...
A couple days before the final music video from the album was released, the account deleted its final tweet and briefly changed its header image to a code which, when decrypted, helped fans locate snippets of the video. The video snippets were edited with ‘error messages’ warning that viewing them was a violation of the rules of the oppressive religion.
Then... the Blurryface account started blocking fans who tweeted the video snippets, because, when you view the Twitter account through the lens of the band’s story, it’s a mouthpiece for the evil organisation that’s trying to prevent the band’s message getting out.
So, basically, there’s a Twitter account with 160,000 followers and zero tweets, which treats fans like the enemy. It goes against every rule in the social media handbook. But it’s an integral part of the band’s marketing.
What we can learn from this
Don’t be afraid to bend the rules.
This ties back to two things we mentioned above: Billie’s ‘Close Friends’ stunt, and the art of showing, not telling.
It’s a common tactic, for example, for musicians to delete everything on their profiles (their main ones, not their weird cryptic secret ones) before launching into a new era.
Musicians also had to think outside the box when Universal Music Group temporarily pulled their catalogue from TikTok in early 2024. Some circumvented copyright detection by adding sped-up versions of their songs to posts (sped-up songs are also an increasingly common tactic for getting more streams, because more streams = more money).
Supermarket inspo: from April 18th 2016 to October 28th 2022, supermarket chain Aldi stylised their entire Instagram feed as one long table, with each individual photo showcasing a single dish, surrounded by props that would cleverly bleed into bordering images. It must have taken enormous amounts of effort to keep up for six years. ‘Collage grid’ feeds on Instagram can feel a little tired these days, but Aldi’s will always be remembered as a peak example.
Restaurant inspo: in 2017, the burger joint Wendy’s (who were already known for pioneering the trend of brands roasting their customers and, um, acting horny) replied to a teen named Carter Wilkerson, promising him a year of free chicken nuggets if he got 18-million retweets. It didn’t take long for the Twitter hivemind to make Carter’s dream a reality, and, true to their word, Wendy’s came through with the nuggs. As of mid-2024, it’s still the fourth-most-retweeted tweet of all time.
So, moral of the story: find unintended uses for social media mechanics, and use them to your brand’s advantage.
Look outside your industry for inspiration
Regardless of which industry your business operates in, these five tips can be applied to your digital marketing campaigns:
Share exclusive content and offers with your most loyal fans
Build elaborate and engaging stories around your brand
Sometimes, being subtle and teasing things is better than outright announcements
Create memorable immersive experiences, either online or in real life
Use the mechanics of social media platforms in exciting and unexpected ways
It can be easy to see what our own sector is doing and try to put fresh spins on certain trends, but some of the best campaigns are born when we combine techniques from different industries in ways that may seem unintuitive at first, but which leave long-last impressions when they find their feet.