Gorillaz: Colour Outside The Lines

31 May 2010

by Eamonn Forde

With Radiohead, Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones jumping ship, EMI is pinning very real hopes on a bunch of animated antiheroes to save the day. But how do you market a band that don’t exist?

Gorillaz started as a side project by Damon Albarn, taking time off from Blur, and his thenflatmate, designer and illustrator Jamie Hewlett. By the time of their second album, Demon Days in 2005, the side project had become bigger than Albarn’s ‘day job’ band. Earlier this year, the band released their third album, Plastic Beach. Around them, Terra Firma (which bought EMI in 2007 and immediately saw an exodus of acts and executives) was facing financial meltdown as it scrambled to offset debts and pin down equity assurances. The pressure on the shoulders of any act to “save the company” is bad enough, but given that Murdoc, 2D, Noodle and Russell are (whisper it) not actually real, the band had to pull out all the digital stops to try and ensure that EMI, the company that bankrolls them, would not capsize. It is believed that Gorillaz have a very unique contract with EMI, given the immense financial outlay needed to create the visual side of what they do. There was a certain precedent set here with EMI’s 2002 re-negotiation with Robbie Williams, but TMN was told off the record that Gorillaz are effectively a joint venture between the band, the label and CMO, Albarn’s management company.

As one of the biggest releases on EMI this year, there was enormous expectation around Plastic Beach, both in terms of its sales potential and in the innovation around its marketing. Discussions around how this album would be promoted began back in the summer of 2009. While there was a rough proposed release date, nothing was set in stone and early meetings were about boiling down ideas. VP of Digital at EMI UK Dan Duncombe says, “The scope was huge and we had a phenomenal number of potential ideas when we first sat down with CMO. It was about whittling them down and picking the right ones that would fit with the band and that would affect sales.” As Plastic Beach was seen to be more mature than preceding albums, the strategy was to reach into new audience demographics while consolidating the existing fan base. With artists including Mos Def, Lou Reed, Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals and the Syrian National Orchestra performing on different tracks, this was seen as a key way to reach new fans. “It’s such a diverse record that that opportunity was given to us because of the number of acts on there and the audiences they attract,” explains Duncombe. The Blur reunions shows last year happened at the stage when Gorillaz, EMI, Zombie Flesh Eaters (Hewlett’s design company) and CMO were scoping out the campaign.

Was there a conscious driving of a stake in the ground to say, ‘That was Blur and now this is Gorillaz’ with the early stages of the Plastic Beach campaign? “That wasn’t the case,” says Parlophone’s marketing director Rob Owen. “We always knew there was a Gorillaz record coming and it just so happened that the Blur reunion happened when it did. Anything that gets Damon’s name out there is a good thing when you have a new Gorillaz record coming. There’s nothing wrong in that.”

Perhaps more so than with any other acts, pre-planning is absolutely critical to a campaign for a record like Plastic Beach. “You can never do anything on short notice with Gorillaz,” says Owen. “It’s like turning a supertanker in the ocean – you can’t suddenly decide to change direction. You have to plan in advance. Videos take four months to complete, so you can imagine what we are working toward now in terms of going into next year.” The band are well known as digital innovators, but things have moved on massively since their last album. As an illustrative example, the same month Demon Days came out (May 2005) saw the debut of a niche interest video site – YouTube.

“If you are PR-ing an album and have a band with characters like 2D, Murdoc, Noodle and Russell, it makes perfect sense to use those digital channels,” says Duncombe. The challenge this time around, however, lay in serving all the new digital channels that emerged and changed the landscape since the band’s last album. Creating bespoke content for all these platforms requires a long lead time and significant financial outlay. “We were dealing with a huge amount of content,” says Duncombe. “Probably far more content than for any other artist.” With all these new platforms to serve, did that impinge on the available budget for this album? “Animation is not a cheap thing to do,” says Owen. “To do it to the level that Gorillaz do, there is no scrimping on the cost. And why should they? In terms of how that affected us with the budget, it didn’t really. We are providing tools and assets for use around the globe. Not all of those tools and assets put forward at the start will be done initially, but they can be added throughout the campaign. The cost can be spread across the campaign as long as you know where you’re going with it and what the storyline is.”

Because of the unique set up behind Gorillaz, costings are worked out very differently to how they would be for other acts. “The budget is just attributed in a different way,” explains Duncombe. “We don’t have bands on the road or stylist costs in the same way that you’d have with a traditional release. There are expenses that you wouldn’t have in other campaigns; but then we save money as we have interesting opportunities through the likes of Twitter to use the voices of the characters which are unique to a project like this.”

For a band that (for the most part) exists digitally, the plan this time around was to use a diverse range of platforms to target specific audiences and broaden the band’s appeal.As Duncombe says, “The landscape has changed so much in terms of how we work with strategic partners, platforms and third-parties as well as use technology.” Online gaming, for example, was used explicitly to reach an audience that had (for the most part) abandoned traditional media. “The reason we invested in creating online games as part of the marketing campaign for specific artists is that we know there is an audience out there that has turned off from radio and TV and are solely online,” explains Duncombe. “These people are going elsewhere and that has complimented the rise in gaming and the social acceptance of gaming, both online and offline, with things like PS3 and Wii.”

Just covering all the digital bases for the sake of it was not an option and every decision had to be justified within the context of the unfolding Gorillaz narrative. And while the approach works for Gorillaz, it does not follow that other acts can lift the best ideas and apply them to their own marketing. “People need to be careful,” cautions Duncombe. “There are certain acts you can do this with and certain acts that you can’t. Equally, there are certain brands you can do this with and certain brands that you can’t. It is very easy to grab headlines by creating something that looks cool but doesn’t do anything for you in terms of driving your traditional revenue product.” Planning is critical here and the plot for the album had to be worked out in intricate detail several months in advance and it already stretches into next year.

Despite the band having been on hiatus for five years, their story continued to evolve on their website even without any new product to promote. With a narrative this complex, and the campaign designed to target new demographics, putting the different elements together in a way that made sense and served a clear commercial function was the biggest planning challenge. “The thing that is very different with Gorillaz,” says Owen, “compared to many other artists, is that you are telling a story. You have to work out how you are going to tell that story leading into release.” Duncombe adds, “We knew the story and we knew the way in which that story could be told through a script and visuals. Based on the level and the complexity of that content and/or the story, we would then be able to attribute that to a certain partner.” This was then mapped across onto audience segmentation data to figure out which elements and assets would be best targeted at specific demographics – some of whom were already fans and some of whom were not. “There were lots of different layers to the digital campaign,” says Owen. “Some were about an existing fan base while some were about attracting a fan base that was new to the project, coming via the other artists and collaborators on the album. Duncombe adds, “In terms of layered assets and tools, it was about working out how to target the audience we understand we have from our segmentation research using the tools and assets that we have got.”

So how did that manifest itself in the lead up to the album’s release? “What we tried to do this time was create specific assets targeted at those audiences,” says Duncombe. “You’d have, say, a tabloid reader versus a tech blog reader or a YouTube watcher versus an MTV viewer. It’s about tailoring content for them such as teaser trailers, excerpts, characters idents, statics and so on. Telling the story of Gorillaz can be relevant to an über-fan but not so relevant to a tabloid reader, for example. It was about finding the right tools to tell that story to the relevant demographics.” Equally, three albums in, a move away from a wholly digital campaign was seen as important for broadening the album’s potential reach. Alongside an iTunes LP, online gaming and a heavy social networking presence, the band also did a number of radio takeovers. Damon Albarn even appeared on the cover of the NME; if not entirely breaking down the fourth wall, then certainly putting a substantial crack in it. “In terms of the way we work with an imaginary band plus real artists and a design studio that create all this content,” concludes Duncombe, “the learning curve is about figuring out how all that fits together.”