Case Study of Marketing Campaign: Arcade Fire - Reflektor

Why
We have chosen to study the digipack, website and marketing of Arcade Fire. We feel that as a band although the music is different the same type of theme is present between them and our own band Rivera. The bands newest album "Reflektor" which is still to be released also seems highly conceptual so the bands branding and image in the public eye is similar to or a possible inspiration for our own band.

Marketing
Arcade Fire created a sense of anticipation and put their album into the public eye through a unusual international marketing campaign. Stencils were seen around the world from new york to rome suggesting that the bands now official announced fourth LP will be called "Reflektor. At least two street artists have confirmed that Arcade Fire commissioned them to draw the Reflektor logo on walls around their town. A"mysterious"account on instagram began to track the locations in which this symbol was appearing, this instagram account gave fans a website named "thereflektors.com", on this website was a fuzzy video that showed someone drawing the logo in chalk. Arcade Fire didn't comment on the logos but their youtube page wrote "no comment" giving the suggestion that the band was behind the logo and confirmed suspicions that it was the title of their fourth LP and the title track of the record.

Video 1
Two music videos were released for the albums title track "Reflektor" within the same day. The first video released was an interactive experience which has become a theme within some of the bands music videos with them having done it in past videos such as "Neon Bible" and "The Wilderness Downtown". The effects in the video are controlled by the viewer, linking in with the title of the song making the viewer simply a "Reflektor" as the video reflects their actions. This creates a relationship between the band and the audience creating a lot of anticipation for the album and a loyal fanbase. This video can be found at: www.justareflektor.com

Video 2
The second is a traditional non interactive music video, it is filmed in black and white and has been heavily influenced by "Film Noir" style movies and videos. In the video the band members have giant masks over their heads which is again a continuation on from a past video as they did this in the video for Sprawl II, showing that the artist is once again trying to keep up a pre-existing image and relationship through this campaign despite selling a new product. This video is highly conceptual and we feel it can be used as inspiration for shot types and some possible ideas in our own music video.
This video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E0fVfectDo

Website

The album cover for Arcade Fires "Reflektor"

The bands website keeps up the simple black and white style theme that has been present throughout the whole campaign for this album, the album cover included in this colour scheme. It uses the same chalk style writing as was used by the street artists around the world and therefore gives a strong link between the different aspects of the campaign. Despite its simplicity the website advertises the band and the album well making it seem that they are not overly commercialised and are therefore something that more "indie" fans will want to buy into and be a part of
The website can be found at: http://www.arcadefire.com/reflektorpreorder/us/



Conclusion
I feel that this task was an important one as although we have analysed digipacks and websites in other tasks studying the whole market campaign as a whole gives you a much wider picture and better idea of how to do it yourself. Through studying the campaign we get to see the kind of ideas that carry across through all areas. In the case of Arcade Fire's Reflektor it was the graffiti style text and grey/silver colour scheme. Also as we did the study on an artist of similar genre of our own releasing a new album it gave us ideas of how to do it ourselves. I feel it was much more effective studying a recent campaign rather than a past one as the recent one will have more of an insight into how to attract attention and create a relationship with the fans in the modern day.

Collection of Images from the case study