Behind The Campaign: Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here

Pink Floyd’s ninth studio album, Wish You Were Here, turned 50 on 12 September 2025. In late 2024, in a deal estimated at $400 million, Sony Music acquired the band’s full catalogue, as well as their name and likeness – a deal which brought everything under one roof globally.

Earlier in 2025, the band’s 1972 live album and film, Pompeii – MCMLXXII, had been reissued, helping to pave the way for the anniversary edition of Wish You Were Here, which was released on 12 December 2025.

Sony Music’s Charlie Stanford (SVP, catalogue), Josh Cheuse (creative director), Elliot Stubbs (senior director, marketing), and Cat Corrighan (audience communities senior director) explain how this campaign was set up, where they tapped into the long-established creative world around the band that had been steered by design company Hipgnosis, why they wanted to go far beyond the standard boxset liner notes, where new audiences were built on social media and DSPs, and how fan communities were both nurtured and involved in the campaign. 

Setting up the 50th anniversary

The reissue of Pompeii – MCMLXXII earlier in 2025 helped to set things up for the 50th anniversary edition of Wish You Were Here, coming three years after the 50th anniversary campaign around Dark Side Of The Moon. The challenge was ensuring new archive material was found and new creative angles were applied to an album that has been repackaged and reissued multiple times over the years.

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Charlie: Pompeii – MCMLXXII was something we had been working on before we had taken over [the catalogue globally]. It was an amazing campaign and generated number ones. But Wish You Were Here was the first opportunity we had to celebrate a major anniversary – the 50th. 

We pulled together a campaign we could all stand behind and be proud of. It was starting from a zero base. We had to do all the work of going to the archive, finding the content, establishing an aesthetic for the campaign, and then delivering on that.

The A&R is run out of the US, but we worked with people like [producer] James Guthrie, who has a long history with the band on this, and also [musician/producer] Steven Wilson. It was a mixture of working with people with knowledge and also bringing new people in to freshen it up. 

We go into this thinking we should let the content lead, so that’s getting people into the tapes, digitising, listening, trying to find interesting and compelling pieces of content. We found some really cool stuff, so that allowed us to build a box around it. The content led the decision-making. 

Launching a DSP teaser campaign

Pink Floyd fans would have been expecting some sort of anniversary campaign for the album, presuming deluxe physical editions would be a key part of it. The campaign, however, announced itself on DSPs first, showing the importance of bringing in streaming-first audiences. 

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Elliot: One of the things that everyone latched onto when we were discussing the campaign was the idea of unwrapping the album. It started with that black plastic and opening it up to get to the amazing imagery and the music within it. All that tied into the ideas of absence and loss that go through the album. 

What came from some of the initial creative discussions was the idea of distilling that cover into that phrase [“Two man in suits shaking hands, one man is on fire”] which reflects a lot of the themes of the album. We were all instantly drawn to that idea. A lot of the marketing ideas flowed from that.

We were thinking: how do we take that physical sensation into the digital realm? So the decision was made to wrap the band’s entire discography in black plastic and distill that cover imagery to minimal text captions. It was just to tease it and see what the reaction would be. 

Charlie: We definitely wanted it to be cohesive, so we’d planned a rollout that would start to get people talking. We could see across forums and socially how that would go, and then that would roll out across the band’s channels. 

Honouring the band’s strong creative identity

Design company Hipgnosis – notably the late Storm Thorgerson as well as Aubrey “Po” Powell – were pivotal creative collaborators with the band throughout their career. The campaign placed their work as absolutely central to all the creative ideas. 

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Josh: We took up this mantle of the incredible music archive, as well as the whole Hipgnosis [design] lore and all that creative, to bring it into the now and make it accessible for the different ways that people consume music now. 

Let the creative lead. We’re super respectful of that and we care so much about that. We want to deliver that to young and old, and everyone in between, in creative ways.

We’re in the Floyd business for good now. We have to make it count. 

Elliot: It was a pretty quick [turnaround]. We were overjoyed by the reaction, so it accelerated things a little bit. People were so intrigued and excited by it. We were moving fluidly with it.

Charlie: We did this cool treatment on the DSPs and their socials across the whole catalogue. Fans loved it. We moved the announcement up a little bit. We did a great poster campaign across multiple markets, using the image from the album with the two men shaking hands. It stands up now as it always did. 

Simon Armitage poem and fan memories hub

A boxset with extensive liner notes on the making of the album and its musical/cultural legacy would have been the obvious route to take, but this campaign wanted to do something in line with the creative thinking behind the original album. They brought in poet laureate Simon Armitage to write a new poem on what the album meant to him as well as getting the fans’ input on what it has meant to them. 

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Elliot: Because they’re so massive, and they’re now part of the classic rock firmament, it’s easy sometimes to forget how radical their art is. 

Our approach from the start was very much that this isn’t music that’s fossilised. It’s urgent music that’s really reflective of our times. 

When we were initially discussing the package, we felt very strongly that this is a story that has been told many times in books and in the music press. We really wanted to approach it differently. At Sony, we love scholarly, detailed liner notes as much as anyone, but we really wanted to approach every aspect of this campaign in a very artful way. 

We decided to explore the idea of bringing in a serious, visionary writer to create something much more elevated, something that uses the record as a springboard for something more creative and ambitious. We got a shortlist together. We worked with DawBell, our PR team, on this. Simon Armitage was at the top of that list. We knew he was a fan, but we didn’t realise the level of affinity he had with this particular album. 

We didn’t brief in the traditional sense. We would never have the neck to guide the poet laureate! We said, “We’ve got a blank piece of paper. How do you want to interact with the material?” In our first meeting, Josh and I were fizzing with excitement. He [Armitage] was amazing. In that first discussion, he really set the tone for what we were trying to achieve. And we saw a slice of how he conceptualised in real time. 

Josh and I were furiously writing notes, because he was just casually dropping all of these amazing bon mots on the importance of the band. 

Josh: He said, “They killed classical music with one strum.” That was on our first call with him. I wrote it down on an envelope. I was just grabbing any surface to write things on because he was coming up with these things. Afterwards we said, “This is the guy!”

Because they’re so massive, and they’re now part of the classic rock firmament, it’s easy sometimes to forget how radical their art is. “

Elliot: He [Armitage] went away and came back with this incredible piece. It was a surreal and manic piece called ‘Dear Pink Floyd’. We were all instantly in love with it. 

He articulated things there that we then used as springboards for other conversations throughout the campaign. Simon was opening a door for a way to approach the album.

Cat: We had the poem, which was beautiful, and all the incredible artwork. We then created this online space where fans could submit their memories of Pink Floyd or their poems from anywhere around the world and share these postcards on their socials.

Facebook’s a big platform for them. We also have a lot of fans on Instagram. Now we’re bringing in the younger fans across TikTok. 

Alongside this, we launched a community channel, which we called Pink Floyd HQ. That was across SMS and WhatsApp. This gave us another way to target new fans and older fans.

Throughout the campaign, we dropped teasers of the ‘Welcome To The Machine’ video. That was the first time any audience had seen the footage from that video on their channels.

We [pushed this] through pop-ups on the website, email newsletters, and also through our social channels, saying, “Welcome To The Machine. Sign up to this new platform and space to communicate and join a new community.”

Throughout the campaign we created exclusive merchandise for that channel alone, and the only way you could access that was by being a part of this community […] rewarding them with these offers that weren’t available elsewhere. 

Noel Fielding artwork

Taking a different angle, and throwing back to the band’s founding member, Syd Barrett (who had left the band in 1968 but was the lyrical focus of much of the album), comedian and presenter Noel Fielding created paintings referencing the band’s troubled founding member. 

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Josh: In terms of liner notes and those types of things, there are so many books where the superfans are writing, “On this day, so-and-so is using these strings, and they used this amp at this studio and then they had a tuna fish sandwich.” Now we’re trying to use the creative to inspire more creative. We’re not going to do liner notes about the studio rota because that’s already out there if the fans want that.

When it came to ‘Shine On Your Crazy Diamond’, this is the first time that the suite [all nine parts] was together as one. I knew Noel Fielding was a Syd fan. He’d shown me all these paintings of Syd Barrett. I said, “Could we do something with those? Would you do a painting, and then maybe I could film you doing it?” I brought one camera man and we just had a jam with him, and he created these paintings. It’s very organic. The music makes more music, the art generates more art. 

Playlist generator and pop-up merchandise shops

Involving the fans, both in the real world and in the digital realm, was a guiding principle of the campaign, with a playlist generator helping to hook the 50th edition of Wish You Were Here to the rest of the band’s catalogue as well as a partnership with the News & Coffee chain to sell a special vinyl edition of the album, a fanzine, and exclusive merchandise items. 

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Cat: We thought it would tie in quite nicely to the whole ‘Welcome To The Machine’ theme. 

The playlist generator enabled fans to create their own personalised Spotify playlist by combining tracks from, obviously, the Wish You Were Here 50 album as they were released, and then with music from Pink Floyd’s extensive back catalogue. Fans could actively shape their own listening journey. 

We blended the anniversary release with deeper cuts and iconic tracks. It reinforced the discovery of the back catalogue while celebrating the band. Each playlist that was generated had unique tour pass artwork.

Josh: There were pop-ups in Berlin and Milan. There’s a lot of talk of digital. We love digital […]but at the same time, we love to make objects – things that you can hold, cherish and collect.

The News & Coffee people I’d met through a friend who runs an agency. I called up and said, ‘“I have this Pink Floyd idea.” They said, “We have all these kiosks in all these different cities. We could activate all of them.” Out of that came the fanzine, posters and stickers.

We gave them creative assets to wrap their kiosks with. We had a special vinyl edition that you could only get at News & Coffee and that felt fun because then it’s out on the street; it’s not just on your phone.

Charlie: On the day, we went to the one in King’s Cross [in London, near the Sony offices]. It was lovely interacting with the fans. Josh had printed these cool little badges we were going to use for an event but that we didn’t use in the end. We went down the line giving these Wish You Were Here badges out to the fans and talking to them. 

Perryscope merchandise and limited-edition vinyl variants

Physical products are a big part of the band’s business and this campaign brought in a range of physical editions of the albums as well as merchandise items that went far beyond T-shirts and tote bags with the album cover printed on them. 

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Charlie: Because of the nature of our deal [with Pink Floyd] we work very closely with [merchandise company] Perryscope. They were brought in early for those initial conversations. We had some ideas, but then they came back with the cigar ashtray idea. Then we had the idea for the fire extinguisher. Then they came back with something else. 

They used the creative we’d used on the DSPs to create T-shirts that did really well. It was all sorts of things feeding into each other. We did multiple drops, using that to drive people to sign up through exclusive content. We did limited runs, like the fire extinguishers, which were limited to 150. It was a really fun thing to do and the fans really liked it. It wasn’t traditional merchandise.

Elliot: The physical side of the releases is obviously hugely important with Pink Floyd. From the start, we planned a specific portfolio of formats. We knew the fans would want a box that was rich and deep. But we wanted the barrier for entry to be really low, so there was something for every kind of fan. If you’re a super audiophile who is only interested in immersing yourself in the audio, you can get everything on the Blu-ray. Or if you’re a collector who craves an alternative version of the vinyl, you can get that. 

The partnership with Blood Records was excellent. That team was so enthusiastic, exacting and creative. I think even they were surprised by the response to the two editions that they did, which sold out instantly. I am biased, but the quad-filled liquid edition is one of the best releases they’ve ever done. It really complements the original artwork. 

‘Wish You Were Here’ video

The album was originally released in an era when promo videos were not the norm, so the title track was given its first official video. 

Josh: That was fun. We were working with Dilly Gent, who was famous for her Radiohead commissions. We got a young editor who brought a different perspective to it. We created a whole film for the album when we first did a listening, and then we started to cut that down into little bites that became those microfilms on socials. Then we rolled out the actual ‘Wish You Were Here’ video, like a gift to fans right before Christmas. 

We had made this thing and we thought we had to share it. I feel like the fans get that we really care about this and [know] we’re trying to do it justice.

Charlie: The film was for the Dolby Atmos playbacks, which we did in multiple markets. It would be easy to have a pack shot on the screen and let people listen to the album in Dolby in a dark room. But we thought, “How would Floyd want to do it?” They’d probably want to, with [Hipgnosis founders Po and Storm], create something visually alluring. So that’s what we did.

Building their social media

Super-serving existing fans with vinyl variants and deluxe boxsets can only be part of a catalogue campaign. It is essential to draw in new audiences so social media platforms were at the forefront of audience activities.

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Cat: All of the artwork and creative was incredible. Our Instagram followers grew substantially over the campaign, and across TikTok as well. Having those beautiful microfilms were such a lovely way to get a new audience in and to celebrate the music.

Charlie: That’s how people consume within that [younger] age group. We’ve seen double-digit increases across the younger audience on Spotify, for example, which is exceeding similar artists. So what we’re doing is definitely resonating with that audience. 

A main focus for us is keeping the music vibrant and getting people to discover it. The music itself is strong enough to do that. Part of our responsibility now is finding new ways to get people to engage with this amazing art.

K-pop act Fifty Fifty’s cover

Another new way to introduce the band to new audiences and new generations was through a strategic cover by a K-pop act. 

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Elliot: Collaboration is key. We were talking to our South Korean team, who were working with pop group Fifty Fifty and, after a call we had with them on general Pink Floyd business, they reached out and said, “How do you feel about Fifty Fifty maybe doing a Pink Floyd cover?” We loved the idea of connecting this to the Wish You Were Here celebrations. 

From idea to rehearsing and recording, it was really quick. Within a couple of weeks, Stacy Nam from Sony Korea sent us the song. They very quickly put together a video. They’re so professional. Everyone loved it. 

I was a little nervous about how the Pink Floyd fanbase would react to a group that was interpreting the material, a group that’s so far from Pink Floyd’s origins. But the reaction when the video went out was incredible. Obviously it opens up a new audience for us, which is great. 

Pink Floyd fans feel the reverence Fifty Fifty had for the source material, and they could see how their interpretation took them to a different emotional place. They gift Pink Floyd to their children and to their grandchildren. They don’t gate-keep it. They want everyone to see how great this music is. 

The band’s second #1 of 2025

The campaign realised its high ambitions, ultimately achieving two number 1s in the same calendar year for a heritage band – a rare event. 

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Charlie: Obviously number one is an industry staple, but it’s very satisfying to be the best-selling album in the UK, particularly in Christmas week. We don’t go in with that expectation, but it just shows the quality of the music. And we got it to number one in lots of other markets. 

Elliot: We had two number one albums in a year with Pompeii – MCMLXXII and Wish You Were Here. That was in the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. And we had top 10s across multiple markets. Pompeii – MCMLXXII also cracked the top 10 of the global film chart that week. 

How many artists can do that? Have two number one albums in multiple markets across the world in the same calendar year, plus get a film in the top 10? We were overjoyed with the results.

Charlie: The Official Charts Company in the UK reached out to ask for a photo [to mark it being number 1]. We thought, “Why don’t we get two of the awards that we’d got for number ones, set one on fire and then film that?” Within six hours, we’d got a really lovely creative that ties in with the whole campaign. 

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