Research - Florence + the Marketing Machine

Last week saw the release of Florence + the Machine's latest and second album, Ceremonials. In the lead-up to this, advertising for the album and artist reached a sky-high, with a marketing campaign that spanned across various forms of media. As a fan of Florence, I was obviously exposed to a lot of this, but I decided to do a bit more research and found even more various ways in which Ceremonials was and continues to be marketed. All of this follows a pre-release leak, which has in the past caused albums to underperform drastically in sales. Therefore, the marketing for Florence's new album was more important than ever, in order to reach as wide of a CD-purchasing audience as possible.

This was dominated by several TV promotions. Her appearance on Later... with Jools Holland - a BBC music programme which has been going strong since 1992, and continues to be an important example of how artists can make live appearances to promote their latest singles and/or album - saw her perform the promo single What the Water Gave Me, along with the single No Light, No Light. An extended version of the show, which aired on Friday, saw her also sing the album track Breaking Down. The selection of songs she sung was interesting, as she opened with a song that the public may already be familiar with, whilst she also promoted her upcoming single, and an album track which gave viewers a taste of what else to expect from the album.



However, this was nothing compared to her (exclusive) performance of Shake It Out on Sunday's The X Factor results show, which was probably her biggest promo appearance to date. She stole the show with a rendition of the lead single lifted from Ceremonials, and was seen by approximately 10 million viewers across the UK. The single re-entered the official chart last week, and judging by its position on the iTunes chart (no. 13 at time of writing), it is set to unsurprisingly reach an all-time high this Sunday after a boost owed to 'the X Factor effect' (check out this blog post I came across that illustrates what I mean quite well). In addition to all of this, an advert for the album has been shown on TV (quite a lot, I presume, since I alone witnessed the advert on at least three separate occasions, and I haven't even beuen watching a lot of TV lately!) Click here to watch the advert in question. This is interesting because, excluding advert breaks in between music-related programming, you don't see albums being advertised on TV very often anymore.

Florence + the Machine performs on The X Factor

The internet also played a key factor in spreading the word about Ceremonials, with the leak itself having had the potential to create a positive effect (believe it or not, there are people who download music illegally - such as the Florence leak - on a 'try to buy' basis, or out of anticipation of hearing the new material, before actually going out to get a copy of the album). In addition, newsletters promoting artists are very common, and I receive a quite a few of these every week straight into my inbox (mind you, the effectiveness of this kind of marketing is questionable, as I hardly ever read them).

Screenshot of my e-mail inbox after using the search term 'florence', + an e-mail I received advertising her  X Factor performance.

There have also been countless reviews, music site posts, banner adverts, etc. advertising the album online, and it would be impossible to list them all. However, below is just one example that I got Charon to screenshot, with this blog post in mind. She then mentioned how she had spotted a billboard for the album, which was something I had been asking friends and family about as I wanted a photo of one to upload to this post!

An advert promoting Ceremonials that popped up on our computer whilst editing today (after launching the wrong QuickTime program to create a screen recording).

...

Left: A photo I took after scouring the magazines I have at home. Low and behold, there was bound to be something about The X Factor and thus, Florence + the Machine's performance! Right: Florence graces the cover of NME magazine.

...

Keeping everything in mind, it is no surprise that the album sales delivered, and Florence + the Machine scored their second UK number one album.