Erasure • Features • Private Ear
Promoting Pop!
After Erasure Day on Radio 1, when a large number of signed Pop! box sets were given away as prizes, we were inundated with requests from people desperate to get one for themselves.
Similarly, when Andi Peters wore a Pop! t-shirt on Children's BBC we had enquiries as to where members could get hold of one of these t-shirts (we don't have any!!)
Sometimes it can be frustrating or even infuriating as a fan to see people who almost certainly aren't fans in possession of extremely rare or unavailable items which you won't be able to get hold of or afford.
Janet spoke to Nick Coquet from Mute's Marketing Department about such promotional items & the work that went into promoting the Pop! album.
Pop! Art
The decision was only made in September to release Pop!, so time was very short for everyone, especially with such an extremely complicated design.
The artwork was done on a Mac (as is Private Ear). It took 4 days to originate (transfer from disc to film for printing) and the information was stored on several discs.
For the Discography on the inner sleeve, the 20 singles each needed a video still & the record sleeve scanned. In all there were 42 tint layers! It was the most complicated sleeve that the reprographics house had ever worked on.
The sleeve design is more important than you might realise for selling the album to people who might not have all Erasure's other records. The "20 Hits" on the cover makes shoppers immediately aware it's a Greatest Hits album & reminds them just how many excellent hit singles erasure have released. The "Pop!" logo itself is what Nick called an amplifiable icon - a logo, like Depeche Mode's "Violator" rose, or the X-Ray heads from CHORUS, which can be repeated over & over to build up awareness of the product almost without you realizing.
Boxes & Cubes
The display company (Displaybox) look at the finished artwork & see how to simplify it. They work within a budget and plan items which would be the most effective & appropriate. Fortunately, the sleeves are always bright and so make for good displays. For the Chorus album, for example, there was advance information that HMV's Christmas window displays would be lots of "presents", which is why the Chorus Cubes were produced. This year there are blow ups of different record sleeves hanging in chain store windows, so one of the 19 items produced is a square cardboard enlargement of the cover of Pop!.
All the display items are produced for promotion only and are never intended for sale. They're made specifically to serve the records. As Mute aren't a merchandise company, only the amount needed for promotion are printed up.
Although in an ideal world such extensive advertising and displays wouldn't be necessary, as all the other record companies are doing so, it becomes necessary in order to compete successfully. Many of the items are intended for use in the indie chain stores who can't afford to sell their albums as cheaply as larger chains. Getting a promotional t-shirt or sweatshirt worn on TV is deliberate (it's good subliminal advertising), although the EIS usually ends up having to write back to several hundred people, saying sorry we don't have any for sale!!! The Box Sets went to the pluggers (Ferret & Spanner) to be given as prizes to various radio stations for their Erasure Days.
On the Telly
The advertising campaign for this album has been Mute's biggest to date. A total of £1/2 million was spent, mostly on TV advertising. In a reversal of the usual situation, the large chain stores approached Mute on this album, wanting to do joint TV campaigns.
Market research was done on groups of young people in Newcastle & London to try & find out how the band is thought about and what would be the most effective advertising for the album.
For example, if you see the "Hits Board" displayed in a shop window & wonder why A Little Respect, Sometimes & Who Needs Love Like That come first & the tracks are listed in a different order from the album (which runs chronologically), it's because this was how the singles came out in order of popularity. Blue Savannah, Love To Hate You, Sometimes & Take A Chance were the most popular videos.
The TV adverts you may have seen, were put together carefully using the favourite bits from the most popular videos. The results of what people like to see in a video were quite different for both sexes: Girls prefer them dressing up & having a laugh, whereas boys like to see a band playing instruments. The TV ads were balanced to reflect both of these preferences. The survey also showed that boys are more likely to collect formats, which is definitely reflected in the letters we receive at the EIS.
This has been mainly a TV-led campaign. All the Top 20 albums at the moment have strong TV advertising. Press adverts simply act as a reminder that a record is out. Pop! was released in the last week of big releases for Christmas. In the run up to Christmas, it's really important for the album to be in the Top 10 to catch last minute present buyers.
Mute tries to limit the number of promotional records and items which get out and could then go on sale at inflated prices by private record dealers and tries to monitor where the items go to stop them being sold on, but as erasure are such a collectable band, anything even remotely connected with them becomes "valuable". Sadly, whilst people are prepared to pay ridiculous prices for items dealers may have received for free, they will carry on overcharging.
If fans want to pay high prices for exclusive items (as Julian Dawson 2307 said he preferred), we can only advise against buying bootlegs, as quality can be so poor. T-shirts like the Pop! ones would be extremely expensive to print up in the relatively small quantities we sell through the EIS. However, Nick said that with the next album it might be possible to make certain items available to EIS members.