Campaign of the Month: Jelly Roll
This month, we’re spotlighting the campaign for Jelly Roll’s ‘Beautifully Broken’ album and the support for it from Amazon Music.
Campaign target audience age: 18-24 years, 25-34 years, 35-44 years
Campaign target audience location: US
Amazon Music supported the release of Jelly Roll’s album with an extensive, four phase cross-category marketing campaign that extended over six months. This showcased key moments pre-street week, with intention to create a strong runway of activations to foster momentum into the fall album release.
To kick things off, in April 2024 Amazon Music announced Jelly Roll’s new Amazon Music Original “Should’ve Been A Cowboy ft. T-Pain,” in a press release and revealed that the song would be performed during Jelly’s set at Stagecoach.
They helped facilitate T-Pain’s travel to Stagecoach so he could surprise fans with a performance at the festival. For additional visibility, he had an OOH Billboard in NY, Nashville, and Indio, a livestreamed interview on-site at the festival, and was the Center Stage Guest on Episode 1 of the fifth season of the Country Heat Weekly podcast the same week.
Other marketing drivers included playlist faceout, paid social campaign, and custom emotes fans could engage with and use during the livestream.
Amazon Music also supported Jelly Roll’s pre-release singles and pre-order with an eye catching OOH design that played into the “very demure” social media trend. The company also secured an appearance for Jelly Roll on TNF Tonight—the Thursday Night Football pre-show—to promote his new album and vinyl pre-order before the Miami vs. Bills primetime game.
To align with Jelly Roll’s album release, Amazon Music booked him to perform on the first episode of Amazon Music Live, the livestreamed concert series that airs after Thursday Night Football. His performance aligned with his album Beautifully Broken’s street week, and included a tailgate event featuring the service’s bonfire playlist.
This tailgate event was the start of the fourth and final phase of the campaign and also featured Jelly Roll as the Artist of the Week for Country Music Month. This moment supported not only the album, but his overall catalog with OOH Billboards in NY and Nashville as well as featured placement on the service.
Actionable Takeaways
- Create momentum with a strategically-planned series of activations to keep the artist front-of-mind until the album launch
- Connect your DSP activations with IRL moments – like Jelly Roll did by performing his Amazon Original at Stagecoach
- Build activations – in this case, a tailgate event – that are fun and true to the artist and fans’ communities
- Be across the latest DSP-specific opportunities such as podcasts (in this case Amazon Music’s Country Heat Weekly podcast) or initiatives such as Amazon Music Live
- Jumping onto a social trend still works – especially if done with humour or playful irony
- Time your campaigns so they have maximum chances for support during cultural moments such as Country Music Month
