https://thewild.lewiswatsonmusic.com

Lewis Watson’s product manager, Alex Burford, came up with an ingenious plan to encourage pre-orders for Lewis Watson’s new EP, ‘The Wild’.

The plan was to reward fans who pre-order the album by offering a free alternate EP to the region that generates the most pre-orders.

The public-facing site was fairly basic and simply listed the UK regions in a leaderboard alongside a map of the country. The regions were ranked by their daily pre-order total and allocated a different shade of blue to match their position, like a heatmap.

Based on designs by Kate Brighouse, I used Winston Wolf’s map template to generate the UK map and customised it quite heavily to achieve the results we needed. I had to override a lot of the default CSS as well as making a few adjustments to the jQuery functions. To assign shades to each territory, I applied CSS opacity values as my php script ranked them according to pre-order totals.

Most of the magic in the campaign happened behind the scenes where I built a custom CMS using PHP and MySQL to process the sales data.

The system allowed us to easily import iTunes csv reports and only work with pre-orders for the Lewis Watson EP. After uploading a report my script would check postcode data and assign each sale to a specific region.

My UK geography is somewhat questionable so our long-term intern Declan McAlistair put together a list of all the UK regions matching the first two letters in their postcode. The project gave me a lot of respect and appreciation for Royal Mail and just how specific a post code can be. The post code system in Britain is inspired!

What was initially just an exercise in sorting postcodes and ranking regions, soon turned into a full sales reporting tool. I developed the back-end further to list daily sales for each region and even plot them on a graph. I used the jqplot plugin to generate a line graph with zooming enabled and the option to toggle each of the series off or on.

At the end of the 5 week campaign the winning region was London & South East, now came the challenging part. The reward for the region with the most pre-orders was a free download of an alternate version of the EP, but I had to limit the download to people from that region.

I used the Cities API from ipinfodb to retrieve approximate latitude and longitude coordinates for a visitor, this was then cross-referenced with the uk-postodes api to get a postcode. If the user fell into the correct region, they would be presented with the download link. Knowing that ip location isn’t an exact science, I added an option to manually input your postcode in case the apis took too long to respond or if your region was miscalculated.

Expecting fans from other regions to be disgruntled, we made one song available even if you weren’t from London & South East.

The campaign went incredibly well, helping to deliver Lewis’ highest pre-order figures to date. His UK tour also had a remarkable influence on the campaign with regions jumping to the top of the leaderboard as he performed around the country.

Personally the campaign was a great challenge, allowing me to expand my skillset in a number of fascinating ways.