Warner Music: The Enemy Secret Tour

Mar 05, 2009 by Gary Knox

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They said we live and die in these towns and The Enemy ensured that we’d all have fun while doing so with their recent secret tour.

With a new album out later in the year, the band hit the road, playing 150 capacity venues in towns that are normally off the regular tour schedule of a number 1 selling artist, in order to hone their live set ahead of their full UK tour in March / April.

The band’s record label, Warner Music, tasked Amplify, and digital agency Pepper, with developing a website that allows fans to join in their journey while keeping the locations secret until the day of the gig – http://www.theenemyontour.com

The first challenge was to ensure there was sufficient reason to return to the site, even if you were unable to attend the gigs due to location or failure to secure tickets. This was overcome by live streaming of the gigs via video sharing webhost Qik, which allows users to stream footage from their mobile phones direct and live onto the site. The site also allows registered users to upload images and videos as well as make comments and leave messages for the band and other fans.

The second challenge was to keep the venue locations secret until the day of the gig, while providing content that was engaging and intriguing beforehand. To do this we enlisted acclaimed artist Si Scott to create a tour poster, which allowed for the revealing of all the details fans would need to email for tickets as well as being an actual image that could be used as a tool for promotion.

The video for each location showed Si creating various elements of the poster stopping before the viewer could see the location. At 9am on the day of a gig the video for that location would be extended to reveal the website address fans of the band mailed to in order to attend.

Throughout the tour the band kept fans up to date with their progress via their Twitter page which was skinned to replicate the website. The band even called up lucky ticket winners from the tour bus to let them know personally.

The site attracted over 7,200 unique hits with 80,000 page views. The comments section was particularly active with 168 leaving comments related to the first gig in York. By the time the tour finished in Corby, 428 comments were left in relation to that show – in total, 1,331 comments were left with each date attracting more attention than the last. In addition, 80 images were uploaded from the first three dates.

The activity was covered by all the major popular music press including NME, Clash and oddly Tesco.