1 billion views to date on #BRITs TikTok content, 3.3 billion Twitter impressions on show day and 4.9 million BRITs account followers! For this month's Independent Members Newsletter, our Director of Digital, Giuseppe De Cristifano shares his insights on running a successful campaign for the BRIT Awards 2023 with Mastercard.
Online platforms are now the primary source for marketing the BRIT Awards. Can you explain more about how you use these to drive digital engagement and awareness?
‘Shortform video’ is one of the latest forms of content marketing introduced by social media and digital platforms, which allows users to create videos ranging anywhere from 10 seconds to two minutes. This has been a core element of our BRITs social output for the last few years. We now have a greater number of platforms than ever before to utilise this content with the emergence of TikTok, Instagram introducing ‘Reels’, and more recently the launch of YouTube Shorts in the UK.
Following its inception, we agreed a strategic partnership directly with YouTube Shorts for BRITs 2022 and 2023 and as part of this, the platform created the BRITsUnseen campaign which this year featured BRITs artists Flo, Wet Leg and Sam Smith. This campaign launched just after we announced nominations and enabled fans unrivalled access to artists as they prepared for the show, with behind-the-scenes content of show performers Wet Leg and Sam Smith as they prepared to perform.
The great thing about shortform is that it is engaging content that we can use again and again. Across our social channels we continue to tell the story of the BRITs 2023 and will until next year, using content from our BRIT Rising Star award, nominations and the day itself.
How did you build anticipation in the lead-up to the BRITs?
We are active on our social channels all year round with various content themes to maintain an engaged audience, but our content and focus intensifies in the months ahead of the show. We build anticipation by focusing on key moments ahead of the show.
Leading into the 2023 campaign, we released our audio/visual podcast series ‘The Red Carpet Treatment with Nella Rose’ which led us into the 2023 Rising Star sessions filmed in December, with Flo being announced as winners. We used Rising Star as an opportunity to refresh our online look and incorporated some excellent designs from this year’s trophy designer Slawn into our social assets.
After the Christmas break, our focus switched to the nominations, which this year were exclusively announced via our social channels. We produced a multiplatform live stream across YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and for the first time Instagram, which saw over 1 million viewers watch Vick Hope along with her colleague Jack Saunders share details of the 2023 nominees. In the build-up, we created an influencer campaign featuring Tom Daley, Jack Saunders, Yung Filly, Jill Scott and Joe and George Baggs. Each influencer was supplied with a locked box containing the nominations and was tasked with keeping this secret while helping to promote the forthcoming announcement across their social channels.
Following this, our campaign turned to the four genre awards that are publicly voted for via TikTok. The voting window ran for two weeks at the end of January and millions of fans engaged and casted votes for the artist they wanted to win. Voting, along with the on-platform promotion that TikTok provided, was invaluable in helping to build awareness and anticipation for the show. It also engaged younger audiences who were invested in voting for their favourite artists.
What is most important job on the day of the show for the social and digital team?
We aim to build as much excitement on social media as possible in the lead up to show day, driving audiences to either watch live on ITV in the UK or globally via our International Live Stream on YouTube. But, we also need to tell the story of the day itself!
From our Red Carpet live stream hosted by Nella Rose and Michelle Visage, through to nominees attending and ultimately winning awards and of course the iconic show performances - as well as key backstage moments – there is a deluge of content to collect and share. We do this in a bespoke way for each social platform, so that no matter how music fans consume content online, they will see a version of the BRITs that tells a similar story of the day and ultimately celebrates great British music, whether that’s on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter or via our various live streams.
Our aim is to dominate the online conversation that day and the day after, and once collected during the various stages, editing and uploading content to platforms is our primary focus on the day of the show itself. The team will work into the early hours of the morning to ensure we can do this and we have a sophisticated syndication setup to ensure we can share quickly with artist teams for use on their social channels, as well as our partners like Mastercard and YouTube Shorts.
We know that YouTube plays a vital role in consumption once the show is over and performance content is a key focus for us on the night. Again, we have a finely tuned process in place to make sure that this is supplied back to label teams to upload onto artist channels after the show, enabling fans to relive those performances again and again with this gaining millions and millions of views across the world.
BPI's Digital Team is made up of Director Giuseppe De Cristifano and Senior Digital Content Manager Toby Leveson.
If you would like to find out more about the work of the BPI Digital Team, please contact Giuseppe via [email protected].