Goals
Two-time GRAMMY nominated rapper Joyner Lucas’ ADHD debut album campaign started on October 19, 2018 with the release of “Devil’s Work” culminating the full length album ADHD on March 26, 2020. From the positioning of the songs, skits, lyrical content, and themes, Joyner’s ADHD tells the story of Joyner traversing life from a young boy to a man; both electric and vulnerable at times, tongue-in-cheek moments, back to back bangers and a great balance to the entire record.
For the release strategy, Joyner wanted to do something different than the traditional album campaign, instead opting to release nine singles over the course of two years, without ever committing to a full length project.
This approach meant that each track was able to have it’s own “moment” – free from any expectations or narrative surrounding an album. This gave The Orchard a unique insight into Joyner’s audience, helping us understand what they loved, liked, disliked; how they engaged with this release strategy and which tracks were quickly becoming fan favorites. Ultimately, this allowed us to better understand the audience’s relationship with Joyner and his music and shaped our strategies in real-time.
The Orchard’s main goal throughout the two year album campaign was establishing Joyner as a staple within the Hip Hop community and stimulating vitality around visual moments, including the trending “Will” and “Will Remix”.
Tactics
As our strongest assets were always music videos, we focused on ensuring that our creative highlighted the best of Joyner’s music videos when serving online advertising to existing and new fans. Our strategies focused on super-serving his US core audience, whilst building out custom remarketing pools, lookalike audiences, and ensuring that we were always targeting prior engagers. We focused on strong out of home advertising across key cities in the US where we saw the majority of our consumption come from, mainly: NYC, LA, Dallas, and Chicago.
The release of Joyner’s official music videos represented some of the strongest moments throughout the campaign. With a YouTube subscriber base of 4.6 million fans, the level of awareness and consumption we see from Joyner’s video releases always outperform benchmarks. Of the nine singles released from ADHD, we released seven official music videos, and visualizers for the remaining two. On multiple occasions throughout the campaign, the official music videos and visualizers trended at #1 on YouTube globally.
Our approach to digital marketing focused on partnering with influencers who had audiences we believed valuable to growing Joyner’s audience. These activations focused on custom choreographed dances with acts such as Jabbawockeez & THE FUTURE KINGZ , reaction videos from No Life Shaq and Tik Tok campaigns that focused on transition videos from C Squad that also incorporated huge personalities such as Madison Beer, & Logan Paul
With the release of “Will”, we knew that we had the potential for a truly viral moment, particularly surrounding the video concept. We ensured to drive awareness of the video with a strong creative and target Will Smith’s global audiences. The video trended #1 globally on YouTube and caught the attention of Will Smith himself; subsequently leading to him posting about the video across his social channels and shouting out Joyner.
From there, Joyner and Will’s relationship grew; Joyner was featured in Will’s At Home Snapchat series with the two of them, plus Jaden Smith. What followed in next few weeks included an official Will Remix featuring the Fresh Prince himself, creating yet another huge viral moment, a #1 globally trending video on YouTube, and opportunity to heighten visibility of Joyner and ADHD.
Results
- Over 1.2 billion views across videos on YouTube
- ADHD now has over 760 million streams on Spotify
- ADHD charted #1 album on iTunes Hip Hop and Top 10 on the Billboard Top 200 (US) with a #4 Top Rap Albums (US) and #2 Independent Albums (US)
- ADHD had impressive global charting, including Top 10 in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, with additional charting in Ireland, UK, Switzerland, Belgium, Norway, Netherlands, Germany, and France
- “Will” music video #1 global video on YouTube, now with over 32 million YouTube views
- Will Smith supported the “Will” video with an Instagram post to his 43.7 million followers
- “Will Remix” music video trended #1 on YouTube
View
Joyner Lucas – “Will”
