Given its dual role as both a single promotion and an album announcement, the social campaign for “Battery Lane” was robust—built from the ground up using an inverted-pyramid approach. The goal was to create a genuine sense of mystery and excitement about what was to come through ethereal, evocative posts that slowly revealed more over time. The campaign began by archiving all posts across Zack’s social media feeds to create a blank slate—signaling a major artistic shift to the viewer: whatever “it” is, something is happening.
From there, we developed and deployed video packages across each of his feeds over two weeks, starting on November 17 and culminating with the single’s release on December 4. The first week combined key, out-of-context imagery from the video with moody stems from the song. The final piece hinted at what was to come: Battery Lane.
The following week featured four video pieces offering more concrete visuals of Zack performing acoustic snippets of the song in various locations around the apartment complex, as well as shots of the street sign itself with the release date. The final video built upon the campaign’s established design language by using a key shot from the music video in full, layering each of the musical stems until the complete preview of the song was revealed. These posts also introduced the campaign’s pre-save element, serving as clear calls to action.
Two days before release, a re-edit of the song was posted—visually establishing the video’s central conceit while offering viewers their first full preview of “Battery Lane.” This piece was longer to account for the audience’s earned interest..
Finally, the day before release featured a re-edit of the song’s chorus, acting as the first of seven total snippets deployed across social media and setting it up as the campaign’s “earworm.” It ends with Zack’s friends and neighbors applauding his performance, directly setting up the video’s opening images.
Post-release saw the deployment of clips from the video, tour posters, vinyl announcements, and the performance video of “Battery Lane” from our “Live & Direct” series, all utilizing the chorus of the song to get us to those seven instances of the ear worm.
The Impact
The full leveraging of Zack’s social media presence in promoting “Battery Lane” was a major success. The song boasted over one thousand pre-saves (unheard of for this tier of artist), while it and the video garnered the most organic engagement of any Zack Keim release. The video also helped position the song for success in online media.
The highlight of the campaign was Zack “going back to” the apartment complex to debut the video for its residents, many of whom were featured in it.
I’m told it was quite the homecoming.