Conor Maynard was the perfect choice to test the new approach having built an impressive online following with over 40 million YouTube views before ever releasing a record.

These viewers were our primary target and we segmented them by the type of activity they displayed when watching Conor’s videos. If they’d watched just one, we defined them as ‘warm leads’- those who had shown interest and might want to find out more. If they’d watched several, ‘liked’, ‘favourited’ or shared his content, we called them ‘hot leads’; fans ready to purchase.

Using Google dynamic ad serving technology, ‘warm leads’ got our ‘Discovery’ creative package – a video carousel giving them more information about Conor, with interviews, two videos, a live song and a cover and ‘hot leads’ got one of two calls-to-action.

We delivered the right creative message to the right audience based purely on their existing relationship with the artist.

Both click-thru and view rates were DOUBLE industry norms.

We drove over 44,000 highly-efficient clicks to retail and 38,000 new sign-ups to our mailing list.

Conor’s album went to NUMBER ONE in its first week of release surprising many industry watchers, with over 40% of sales coming from on-line.

And EMI is now looking to adopt the model for all future releases.