The Strange Worlds of Novo Amor's latest campaign (2024)

Team Talk is Music Ally’s weekly interview series, where our marketing experts speak to music industry teams about their latest work, best practices, and smart strategies. You can find the archive here.

Independent artist Novo Amor has listeners around the world, and the campaign for his new album ‘Collapse List’ has a global focus to match that.

Believe worked with geo-location platform Strange Worlds to createan immersive adventurebased on dropping content virtually at different locations around the world that fans could find via an interactive map.

“We wanted to do something that caters to all of them that isn’t just looking at something on a screen,” says Peter Jacquaye, digital marketing manager at Believe.

The campaign was inspired by the success of mobile game Pokémon Go, and the way it subtly encourages people to visit interesting places in the real world.

“When we first started this, we had it be a puzzle. There was a piece in 16 different locations, and the aim was for fans to go to these different locations, and they would find a tile. The tile would have one piece of the album cover, and if you flipped it over it had a letter,” explains Jacquaye.

The idea was to spark fans’ interest and to get them discussing Novo Amor’s new music wherever they were hanging out online: Discord, Facebook, Reddit and other platforms.

“The plan was that fans would then go and discuss in their different communities, Discord, Facebook, Reddit, and discuss it.”

The album hadn’t been announced yet. “People were discussing: ‘Oh my god! Did you hear the song snippet It’s amazing, I can’t wait…’ So the lesson learned was push for more. What may seem mundane from our side on artist services can make their week,” says Jacquaye.

“We gave them a bunch of BTS photos, a bunch of exclusive videos… we made things accessible exclusively to Strange Worlds for a good 20 days before the album came out.”

The idea of pushing for more extended to the global scale of the campaign. At the time Jacquaye talked to Music Ally, it was in 165 countries, 202 cities and 324 different hotspot locations.

“It meant a lot to me to be able to put this in Ghana, to put it in Malaysia. It was about trying to make this as accessible as possible, because his audience is global.”

He praises Strange Worlds for its ability to run campaigns that are “as grand or as granular as you want” as well as to have some elements be time-specific.

For Nova Amor this included listening parties in specific cities, but also ticket giveaways across the UK, Europe and US. Song previews were also part of it, as well as vinyl and merch bundle giveaways. (Forthcoming mooted activations include partnerships with local artists who will create artwork that can be experienced in real life and online.)

Jacquaye and Believe are keen to explore these kinds of technologies in their campaigns with artists, but he acknowledges that sometimes there can be pushback.

“One of the more specific ones would be the web3 NFT thing. When you have a macro sort of event that affects the technologies and the outlook on certain technologies then yeah, you’re going to get some pushback,” he says.

“It’s your job to really showcase the fundamentals of the technology and be like: no, this is what it provides! This is how we’re future-proofing this project. This is how we’re making sure it’s going to be accessible in the future… So it’s about being ahead of the curve, and making sure the music stands the test of time.”

He thinks that the kind of technology showcased by Strange Worlds is going to become more accessible and affordable for a range of artists.

“There’s also room for sponsorship helping to fund these opportunities. Whether it may be a charitable thing or a brand experiment thing for someone else, there are ways to gain funding, especially when you’re providing something that’s going to be so successful and have a reach to countries that may not ever be able to experience an activation from your artist. Africa, South East Asia, wherever it may be: exploring these regions where you have listeners.”

The Novo Amor campaign has been growing steadily: by early April there had been 10,000 total users, and 70,000 visits to the website.

“We’ve had 65 hours of total user engagement,” he says. “That’s only going to grow as we make it more accessible. The only metric that was really important to me was as many locations as possible. And then hopefully the [other] numbers that come back will be great!”