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What Goes Into a Brand – Record Label

Bodhi

What goes into a
Brand

Branding is about building consistency across your touch points

When I started Mooncrew in 2016 alongside Jake Swesey, I knew that the name needed to have an immediate connection to it’s imagery. You might ask – why, isn’t Mooncrew a record label? What’s that got to do with visuals?

Everything!

You see – in 2020 and beyond, more and more of our customers, clients, fans, and business partners will be discovering us online. Spotify and Apple Music have already rolled out beta versions of moving visuals to accompany music, and YouTube Music is a secret smash hit solely because people like to look at something while they listen.

Back to Mooncrew: all of this that meant that day one before we even came up with the name, we knew that the name needed to have visual context and vice versa. Hence – MoonCrew Unlimited, or MCX for short. Mooncrew has an obvious logo mark – a simple, filled in circle. It’s nothing ground-breaking and certainly not copyright-able on it’s own.

However, when in context with careful color considerations and font choice, design placements and palette choices; we quickly settled on a variety of iterations over the years that are pleasing to the eye, remarkable for recollection, simple, and reusable.

Below you can see a few implementations of the logo and how it’s evolved over the years:

2016 – On an event poster

Back then the logo was ‘the moon coming up during a sunset on a summer day’; a moonrise with a sweltering, italicized script-like font to complete the logo mark.

2019 – On an album release

A logo mark evolved into a record stamp – emulating the bygone days of ripping the plastic off of the CD before throwing it into your ’98 Ford Taurus.

2020 – In an album teaser

A logo turned into a movie trailer preroll, the circle mark can be easily pseudo animated simply by making it rise and fall.

What if billboard ads were as easy to place as PPC?

Bodhi

The ease of PPC, PPM, OTT and PMPs have spoiled us when it comes to traditional media. Many outlets like newspapers and TV stations still do not have online portals for placing ads. Billboard providers like Lamar have dabbled in it, but not dove right in.

Enter Blip Billboards – the billboard marketplace solution

Blip Billboards is a company that’s been slowly evolving over the past few years. Recently, they eliminated any sort of minimum billing requirement for placements. This means, with a budget of just $5 – you can get your ad up on a billboard nearby.

When we finished signup on the Blip platform, we were greeted with a Google Maps based inventory selection screen. As you can see from the map below, the locations are rather limited for us here in Iowa (there are none!), however other metro markets offer a few options:

This is still okay, though, especially for a global consulting firm like us! Let’s explore some of the more fun, creative features we can play with.

  1. Blip lets us pick sides of a billboard. This is useful if you only want to hit people going one way (‘leaving so soon? take the next left for….!’), or targeting a specific workplace with visibility of the billboard. We chose both sides, east and west.
  2. Blip lets you put a limit on bid cap by time of day. This is great as we put our bid limits to 0 in the wee hours of the night – we don’t want to target truck drivers on long haul routes. However, you’ll notice that the bid structure heats up considerably from 7:30AM – 9AM and 4:30PM to 6PM.
  3. Blip lets you run playlists. We didn’t choose this option, but you can upload a series of photos and add them to a single campaign, allowing for more dynamic content!

We tested this out by placing a Bodhi Industries billboard just off of I-694 north of Minneapolis, and it worked fantastically! See below for early analytics:

We’re very early on in the stages of testing out Blip, but we are very excited to offer another platform for placement for our customers. For low, low prices; we can combine Blip campaigns with our digital campaigns to provide a holistic and well rounded sales funnel that literally follows your target audience to work, and back again. If you are interested in learning more and placing an ad yourself, click below!

Click Here to Learn More About Blip

If you don’t want to place an ad yourself, or are interested in our packages that include Blip, inquire below!

The Lost Art of the Music Promo Email

Bodhi

As an independent musician, you get it. The market is saturated. Entire sites exist to vacuum up your money and spit out features. Fortunately for you, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Let’s quit wasting your time writing email submission after email submission.

As you play shows and network, you should start to gather a list of like-minded artists, event promoters, playlisters, and related connections. This list right here is your biggest asset as an artist – you need to let these people know what you are doing, but not overwhelm them. Keep them in the loop, but don’t spam them. Let’s take a look:

The Template

TO: yourself@yourowndomain.com
CC:
BCC: radio1@bbc.com; darkgrey@warnerbros.com, editors@spotify.com, davie@bowie.com
SUBJECT: ObeyGrey – Wonderwall ft. Lil’ Mike
BODY: Hey there. I’m releasing my latest tune, Wonderwall, later this week. Here’s a link to stream it privately: [link]
And a private download link: [link]
Please reply back right to me with any questions, otherwise – have a good one!
Charles Smith
————————————-
ObeyGrey’s Social Media
https://facebook.com/obeygreylive
https://obeygrey.com
https://soundcloud.com/obeygrey

TO/FROM/CC/BCC:

Okay. Let’s break down the email above. We start off with a to: simply back to the same email address you are sending from. This is an old marketing trick to prevent your recipients from seeing the list you are sending to, a good thing. Because of this, be sure to put your actual recipients in the BCC section.

SUBJECT LINE:

I have experimented with many variations in the past, and the best open rate comes back to the classic: artist name – song name. If you are targeting this email and can offer the track as an exclusive, put that in there to draw attention: ObeyGrey – Wonderwall ft. Lil’ Mike (Potential Exclusive!). We added the exclamation point for spiciness.

BODY:

You guessed it – we are keeping it simple again. Tell them why you are emailing them, when it’s happening, and how to listen to it. Don’t attach a file, most email filters will automatically delete unsolicited attached files. Include a private download link, preferably one with open tracking, and round it out with your real name as well as social media links.

That’s it! No fancy HTML emails, no flashing .GIFs or emoticon filled subject lines. I’ve found it’s best just to cut the bullshit, keep it simple, and start with why:

I am sending this communication to let you know I’ve released something new on this date for your consideration. Thanks.

There. That’s the heart of your message. With this tool in your independent music marketing toolkit, you’ll be slightly better equipped to take the world by storm.

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