A campaign led by music legend Sir Van Morrison to call for the safe reopening of the struggling live music industry following COVID-19 restrictions.

The U.K live music industry had been completely mothballed due to the restrictions around COVID-19 in 2020. The aim for the campaign was to highlight the financial issues for struggling musicians, artists, and the wider plight of concert promoters and venues to generate further support for those in the industry. At the start of the campaign, The Music Venue Trust estimated that 400 grass roots venues were at the risk of closing with little press coverage to highlight this.

Sir Van Morrison recorded four new tracks which would spearhead our campaign to generate coverage and draw attention across the national media and social media to the issues faced for musicians and artists. He also setup a ‘Lockdown Financial Hardship fund’ through his Rhythm and Blues Foundation that gave single time grants of £500 to successful applicants who needed support during the pandemic.

The public relations campaign promoted the four singles to both national news, music, and industry journalists as well as proactively hijacking the news agenda with commentary on stories of the day calling on further support. Through a combination of paid and organic social media content plans across Twitter and Facebook, we galvanized a large following for the campaign from scratch with the establishment of new campaign channels.

On social media, our brief was to target artists, musicians, music professionals and professionals within the arts performance sector across Twitter and Facebook, with a focus placed on introducing such audiences to ‘Save Live Music’ and supporting the campaign’s objectives.

Our strategy took the form of both an effective, hard-hitting ‘always-on’ organic content strategy, which was supported by a cross-channel paid strategy to further develop campaign awareness and develop strong social media presence.

130

pieces of coverage in the UK and US

No. 5

Amazon Best Sellers chart

3m

three million total post impressions across both social media channels

4,200+

Over 4,200 new followers across Twitter and Facebook

112,000

post engagements generated on Twitter and Facebook

“PHA pulled together an integrated campaign across public relations and social media to generate awareness about the financial issues and dire straits the live music industry was in because of the restrictions put in place due to the Coronavirus pandemic. They secured fantastic coverage in both the U.K and U.S as well as a far-reaching social media campaign from scratch. It was fantastic to work with them and we’d recommend them to others.”
Exile Productions
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