During 2008, Japanese rock bands, D’espairsRay, The Underneath, and MUCC were invited to perform in the Jrock Revolution showcase on the ROCKSTAR Taste of Chaos Tour.

Produced by Warped Tour’s founder, Kevin Lyman’s production company, 4fini, this unprecedented tour featured a showcase of Japanese rock artists on tour alongside popular Western artists such as Atreyu, As I Lay Dying, and Avenged Sevenfold. For the first time in history, Japanese rock had an opportunity to break through cultural barriers that previously prevented them from being accepted by mainstream audiences.

With the Jrock Revolution showcase traveling through 33 cities throughout the United States, EINSOF Marketing Group was brought on to market and promote the tour.

On this particular campaign, I was primarily responsible for strategic planning, development, and execution of the integrated marketing campaign, liaising with clients and partners, and overseeing the entire campaign throughout its entire lifetime.

Starting with an email blast to over 300,000 recipients, we pushed traffic to a landing page that promoted the showcase and the tour, complete with extensive polls and interactive surveys, which allowed us to collect data for geotargeting our offline campaign strategy. We followed our email marketing campaign with a social media blitz across all channels, assisted by an online street team that pushed ads and raised hype on forums and blogs. Our ads ran on websites that would reach our target audience, and also on television and radio.

Our multi-channel publicity approach encompassed newspapers, magazines, webzines, blogs, video channels, television, and radio. We also set up publicity events along the tour, such as autograph signings and meet and greets to give the touring bands an opportunity to engage directly with their fans. We crossbranded a few of these events with TOKYOPOP, who created their own crossbranded microsite for ROCKSTAR Taste of Chaos, and appeared at select stops along the tour. As TOKYOPOP had a massive online and offline audience, and also exhibited at anime conventions nationwide, our partnership with them gave us exposure to hundreds of thousands of eyes that might not have previously been exposed to the tour. Complementing our publicity efforts were the bands’ own, who maintained blogs as they traveled, which generated further interest from their prospective audiences.

To encourage fan engagement, we deployed a street team-heavy strategy, dovetailing our campaign for ROCKSTAR Taste of Chaos alongside our full-scale nationwide campaign to promote JSHOCK DD LLC’s debut releases for D’espairsRay and The Underneath. Riding on the tails of ongoing aggressive street team marketing at conventions, concert venues, and locally along each stop of the tour, our street teams engaged potential fans directly to hype the bands and the tour, passing out marketing materials such as flyers, posters, and other promotional goodies.

As the campaign for the tour ended up hemming so closely to our JSHOCK campaign, we eventually combined the two campaigns and began to cross-market JSHOCK with ROCKSTAR Taste of Chaos, and vice versa.

CONCLUSION

Our publicity efforts resulted in over 200 Jrock-specific placements across all publicity channels. Most notably, we received Jrock coverage from media outlets such as Fuse TV, MTV2, Label Network TV, and Blabbermouth.

Meanwhile, our street teams distributed over 50,000 flyers nationwide, and appeared at 17 of 33 ROCKSTAR Taste of Chaos tour stops, passing out over 2,500 RTOC fliers and over 2,200 promotional bags.

Our efforts pushed tens of thousands of concert attendees who went out in droves to see the shows nationwide.

GALLERY