key campaign highlights

• As part of developing Tayo’s artist brand, we wanted to nail a clear creative identity, to help give Tayo a cohesive aesthetic across socials, artwork and videos. As part of this process, we reached out to a number of creative teams and eventually decided to work with the creative duo, Bedroom Projects. As young, up-and-coming creatives themselves, it felt important to align Tayo with other creatives at a similar stage of their journey, and we loved their unique style of hand-drawn illustrations, highly saturated colours and dream-like visuals. We worked closely with Bedroom to create a series of campaign visuals that felt distinctive and personal to Tayo, eventually developing a space monkey character called ‘Nova’, who would appear across all of Tayo’s artwork and who Tayo would reference to fans online. This would eventually become such a key feature, that we created exclusive merch items for Nova, and eventually set up an instagram account for the character which fans followed and engaged with. All of this gave a distinctive creative edge to Tayo that felt completely personal to him.

• As a new artist it can be hard to garner industry and partner support when first starting out, and we wanted to ensure that we presented Tayo’s artist proposition in the best way possible. In order to give a unique insight into Tayo (ahead of his first release) we created a website that would give key partners and media a uniquely personal insight into ‘Tayo’s world’. Working closely with Tayo, we created an immersive website with personal photos, quotes, home videos, audio messages from Tayo, and a behind the video about his musical journey to date, along with sending out unique Tayo merch to key industry targets. This proved highly effective, as partners responded well to this personalised approach (which went beyond the standard one-pager or press release) and we had an extremely strong first launch, cementing key support for his debut single, ‘Cold Feet’. The track acheived key placements across press and radio, and received strong editorial playlisting from digital streaming platforms, which helped us hit over 3 million streams within the first 4 weeks.

• Success on digital streaming platforms was key target for us, as we knew Tayo’s audience skewed younger and leant towards music discovery online, rather than traditional radio or press outlets. Through a cohesive social plan we continually engaged with digital streaming platforms creating bespoke playlists, participating in partner initiatives and creating social content encouraging fans to stream via these partners (including single and EP listening parties). We used this activity to outreach to digital partners to ensure that they were engaged in Tayo’s world, and we laid out clear focus playlists we wanted to target, including Spotify’s ‘Our Generation’. This consisted, targeted approach saw Tayo’s first two singles ‘Cold Feet’ and ‘Heartbreaker’ become two of the most streamed tracks on the ‘Our Generation’ playlist, and his streams soared by 1000% over six months. By 2021, he was the fifth most discovered artist on the playlist, and his Spotify follower numbers rose by 4,817% over this period.