Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:

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Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.

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[Part 1 of 2]

If you work in the music business, just about everyone agrees that Charli XCX's Brat is the most game-changing album marketing and rollout of the last decade.

But one of the biggest problems an artist has is if you make the most amazing thing of an era, well, now you have to follow it up. And this time you have to go bigger and better. Topping that so you're still perceived as moving upwards is a big deal in this business, since if you're not growing, no one cares. The pressure to always one-up yourself, especially in pop music, is always there. And we recently saw what happens when you show us the life of a showgirl and the fans say I can't relate.

So here's how Charli XCX won the game again by playing a different game than everyone expected. And oddly enough, she's actually done this earlier in her career before. By the end of this, you're going to understand how to play the album release game in a whole new way, and how you can do it even if you're one of the smallest artists in the game.

This one runs over two issues. This week is the thinking behind the rollout, meaning positioning, objectives, and what she was actually going for with this record.

Next week is the tactics she used to pull it off and how you run each of them at your size.

After Charli dropped Brat and we all saw how amazing the rollout was, I made a piece showing that before Brat, nobody really knew what to do with an album in the streaming era once it was out. You'd tour, maybe you make some music videos. I made a whole diagram about this where I called that dead space after an album was out the WTF area.

Charli showed that you keep the conversation going, which is very important for what she did with this album era. During Brat, she released remixes. She kept people talking. The songs had new reinventions that made people discuss how she changed them and how the different collaborators on a quote-unquote remix record reshaped what you thought of them.

What I think Brat really changed in album marketing, and the way I've seen it influence the biggest album marketing since, is that everybody kind of learned you have to keep the conversation going after the record, not drop a remix record 18 months later.

One of the main things I find with artists who don't get what's going on with marketing and can't see the hidden strings behind the actions is they first don't understand what positioning is. Positioning means that when one friend describes an artist to another, how do they describe them as being different from the other artists in the genre?

It was very clear after Brat that Charli transformed from the pop girl who's been messing around with underground producers and has her own quirky thing going on into the actual mascot of underground dance culture who's having the party 365 days a year, making edgy and honest music that's way, way, way more unhinged than all the other pop girls. It was genius, and the position was wide open. Let's be honest, look at the other pop girls. No one was doing a good job taking that part of it.

Positioning matters because when you are seen as the second-rate or even the fifth-rate version of an artist, you're not exciting for fans to talk about, which kills word of mouth, and word of mouth is the number one way you get fans. You also don't get gatekeepers opening as many gates, since they can just open it for that top-tier artist.

When you're talking about an era for an artist, that era has an objective. In fact, I've kind of stopped liking calling eras eras. Sure, it's fun to say that stuff when we're talking to fans, but I like to call them objectives, because that's what we're really thinking about during an era.

That objective is to go from the place where you are before the era starts to a new level that's even higher up when the era ends. We need to get to a next level of the position, or reinforce that we are the best person in that position and everyone below us is playing child's play. If you stay in one position, someone can come and do it better than you, and all of a sudden they become ascendant, and everyone's talking about them. Then when you do what you've just been doing, and it doesn't hit as hard, that's when you become a legacy artist and your career starts to fall off.

Having a goal for where your era is going to take you in positioning by the end is important, or else you're going to make the incoherent mess of videos you see from so many artists who never quite make it. One of the main things I see across all the genres I watch regularly, with those artists who are bubbling under and have a buzz but aren't really popping off yet, is that if their songs are good, they're often just creating things that don't have any legibility. They don't make sense. They may make sense to the artist, but they don't have a purpose that's elevating them toward a position where people go, ooh, that's what's special about that artist, I have to tell my friends about this.

They don't have an objective that gets people thinking about how they're different. That objective gets people talking and builds you up into the position you want to get to. So, as we set these objectives, we often think about how to reverse-engineer the way people talk about us.

If this interests you, it's exactly what we discuss in my membership newsletter every week. For $5 a month, you get a FRESH weekly newsletter every Thursday and will be the first to hear about what’s happening in music marketing RIGHT NOW + access to my whole back catalog of over 100 newsletters where I explain things like this, answer your questions, give away cheat codes for how you blow up in your genre faster than other artists, and dissect how the biggest artists in the world are doing exactly what we're talking about today.

And if you didn't know, I'm writing a whole book on how to do DIY artist development and world building just like this and figure out your position, and my members get access to the rough draft as I write it, which you get if you pay that fee. So tap in and join us.

One of the things to remember about artists who are this good is they know what they want to achieve with an era. With Brat, she wanted to express herself authentically, which is why everyone talked about how the lyrics felt way more raw. Raw was the word everyone kept using. She had radical honesty. The album before that, Crash, was met with a meh from a lot of fans. I mean, I loved it. But it had little of her authentic self in it as she tried to play the game of pop stardom, whereas Brat is when she decided to lean into who she authentically is.

Brat showed us she didn't need to be like the other pop girls. She was her own vibe. With Music, Fashion, Film, she is very clearly trying to show us she's thinking on another level than every other pop girl. Maybe even three levels above them. Basically, she's saying to anyone she'd be compared to, “Oh, you think you're making cinematic shit? I'm thinking about that even deeper. You think you get fashion? You think you know how to play with conversations and get people talking? Watch this.”

It elevates her to the top shelf. Between this, her soundtrack to Wuthering Heights, and the rave reviews of her acting in Erupcja, which I'll admit wasn't my personal fave, the rollout of Music, Fashion, Film confirms that when a brand or an art director wants to reach for the top shelf of collaborator to make high art, she will be the highest of high shelves. That's what she was going for.

A little while ago she wrote a Substack post about not going away. What a lot of pop stars do is decide to disappear for a while and hope you forget that amazing thing they did, so by the time the star returns you'll just be glad they're back and forgive that it's kind of mid. She went the other way.

Once Brat ascended her, she was making a lot of movies. And one of the ways she padded the landing from Brat over to Music, Fashion, Film is that she did the soundtrack to Wuthering Heights. It said, I'm going to change a little bit, but allow me some space to wander around and create.

What's funny is she's done this in the past. After her massive success with Sucker, which had these massive, massive hits, she made a lot of mixtapes before coming back with a full-length. Those mixtapes, Number 1 Angel and Pop 2, allowed her to play in the experimental PC Music and hyperpop world that we've all come to love. It's been a seminal era for her.

One of the interesting things, and I made a video about this years ago, is that when you call it a mixtape, you're basically saying to critics and to people, hey, you can't judge this as one of my records. Even if it has as much runtime as many of my records, I'm playing around, so don't judge it like it's one of my main works and part of my main canon. Noticeably, the Wuthering Heights soundtrack allowed her to do exactly that while she prepared for Music, Fashion, Film.

If you're a follower of this newsletter, you've probably heard me talk about this concept I came up with called contradictions are the conversation. On Brat, the lyrics took that concept as far as it can go. It's really what made me crystallize the idea and bring it to life. We were all discussing how she was pondering things like whether to have a child or do another bump of coke.

On this record, the contradictions became something happening from line to line inside the songs. When you listen to Wink Wink or Rock Music, or the instantaneous contradiction that is the song Yeah, which has no lyrical depth aside from now I'm going to contradict myself, the contradictions are way more instantaneous, and it gets people talking the second the song comes out.

Now I know a lot of you are saying, “Great Jesse, she has millions of people, if not tens of millions of people, tuning into her every word. How the hell do I do this?”

This is one of the things we do have to explore, which is that a lot of people don't get that vulnerability is one of the main things that connects you with others in songs. It's one of the main things you will hear people talk about constantly. I was literally just reminded of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's BAFTA lecture while listening to a podcast by Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon.

One of the main things he talks about is how fearful people are of being vulnerable about saying that thing they're afraid to say. When you actually start to say those things and mess around with them and play with them, you create those conversations and get people actually talking. So many of you don't dare to go anywhere near that border in your music at all.

You could argue a lot of this Charli record is playing with the audience. When you name a song Wink Wink and drop a line about maybe sleeping with someone's dad and then take it back in the same breath, you have to wonder if she's referring to her husband's band, The 1975, and their song about saying controversial things purely for the hell of it. Sometimes it's not just vulnerability. Sometimes we're getting the audience to sit up straight while we talk about a greater issue and get their attention. All of these things can be true, and we can use the different devices within our music and within ourselves depending on what we want to express.

Whether this is all artistic intent or not, a lot of what does marketing and really helps artists grow is honestly creating these references for fans to spot.

The tactics. Iteration and the metaphor quotient, the 42-minute film she dropped on release day, the clout bomb, the one-two punch, dropping lore on other people's YouTube channels, the director Q&As, keeping it light, and the anti-marketing play with the small rooms and the locked-up phones. Every one of them scales down to an artist at any size, and I'll show you how to run each.

See you next week.