How Lady Gaga Co-Marketed New Album ARTPOP With Diehard Fans

Since Lady Gaga came on the music scene in 2008, she has always been “fan-centric.” Now with her third album, ARTPOP, about to release on November 11, she is rewarding her diehard fans with ways to be directly involved in the excitement of getting the word out on the new release.
This album has been a long time coming. Gaga revealed its name through a tattoo she got while on tour for the last album, Born This Way, in August 2012. In February, she was forced to cancel the rest of the tour when she suffered a severe hip injury. During her six-month hiatus to recover, she gave no media interviews and didn’t tweet or post to social media. She, in effect, disappear
If you’re Lady Gaga, then you leverage the strategic asset you have been building for years: your passionate fan base, the Little Monsters. They number in the tens of millions, with over 40 million fans on Twitter and 60 million on Facebook. These fans have been beside themselves about the new music and were eager to help get the word out. Over the summer, with no prompting from Gaga or her record company, fans have been making homemade album flyers and posting them in cities around the world. A few fans in the U.S. started a YouTube show in February called Radio ARTPOP to discuss the upcoming album and to keep other fans excited about its far-off release.
Gaga decided to engage her “One Percenters,” approximately 1% of her total audience, who are the diehard diehards, in order to get the fan base fired up. She did this in three ways:

• Hire your biggest customer evangelists. She invited one of the moderators of fan website, GagaDaily.com, to join the Haus of Gaga, the pop star’s exclusive inner circle of creatives, including her choreographer, stylist, make-up artist and set designers. Emma Carroll is only the second fan ever accepted into the Haus. Gaga met the Carroll, a 19-year-old from Wisconsin who suffers from scoliosis and hip dysplasia, during a stop on her “Born This Way Ball” tour in early 2013. Gaga and Carroll bonded and the singer later paid for the fan’s hip replacement surgery. Carroll has not disclosed her entire set of Haus responsibilities, but says at least part of her job will be social media support for fan communities.

• Create buzz through customer word-of-mouth networks.  Fan YouTube show, Radio ARTPOP, is an online show “of Little Monsters, for Little Monsters,” and is a celebration of all things Lady Gaga. Gaga has said of the show on Twitter, “Watching u become friends, share stories+have creative discussions. Best gift u could give me.” Instead of using mainstream media outlets, Gaga has been leaking snippets of unreleased songs exclusively through the show. She sent Carroll from the Haus to debut previews such as “Mary Jane Holland,” “G.U.Y,” and the title song “ARTPOP.” Selecting a fan show to debut the previews shows all fans that she wants them to hear the music first. The hosts are in effect “ambassadors” for the new song previews, discussing and dissecting each of them for over an hour each episode.

• Give One Percenters the spotlight. Fans have been speculating for the last twelve months exactly which songs would make the cut. Gaga wrote over 100 songs, testing some of them during the concert tour for her last album. When it came time to release the track list, Gaga called an audible. At the last minute, she decided to let some of her One Percenters release the track list for her. A group of fans, calling themselves the LA Rivington Rebels, camped outside her recording studio for a month as she was putting the final touches on ARTPOP. Everyday she would chat with the fans as she entered and left the studio. She decided to reward their loyalty by involving them in the anticipated track list release. She asked the fans to create a graffiti-type mural by spray-painting the song titles on a building wall. At the day and time that Gaga told fans she would release the song list, she had members of LA Rivington Rebels tweet a picture of each song title from the mural every five minutes. Gaga then retweeted each of the fifteen tweets to her 40-million strong Twitter following. While all Monsters were looking to Gaga for the long-awaited song list, she gave the spotlight to some of her most dedicated fans first.

Gaga is also pursuing more mainstream ways of promoting the album, such as putting the first single “Applause” into a Kia car commercial and doing numerous press interviews around the world. But she understands the power of involving one’s best customers in marketing a new album as well.
Your diehard customers, the One Percenters, want to share the product/service/company they love with others, and they want their friends and family to enjoy it as well. These customers love what you do and they want to help spread the word. Just ask them.

Lady Gaga

The Poker Face hitmaker scrapped several shows on her Born This Way Ball tour in the U.S. earlier this year (Feb13) after being diagnosed with synovitis, a severe inflammation of the joints. She subsequently cancelled the rest of the trek after being told she needed an operation to treat the injured hip, and now Gaga is going under the knife in a bid to address the problem. In a post on her Twitter.com page, she writes, "Going in for surgery now. Thank you so much for sending me love and support. I will be dreaming of you." (FGA WENN Photos/Newscom) Lady Gaga carries a puppy as she leaves her hotel in Sofia ahead of the first night of her European tour Sofia, Bulgaria - 13.08.12 Where: Marbella, Costa Del Sol, Spain When: 13 Aug 2012 Credit: WENN **Not for publication in Spain. Available for publication in the rest of the world** (Newscom TagID: wennphotosthree648808.jpg) [Photo via Newscom]