Custom Magnets Go Stickers One Better In Record Promotion

Walk into any record store, and you immediately realize the competition among recording companies for the consumer dollar is beyond fierce. That means unless an album is an immediate hit, the promotion window closes quickly. New releases have to be hyped fast and furious, before a rival label’s disc grabs people’s attention. The situation is probably toughest with rap. Despite an often negative reputation, the genre captures a larger share of the 17 to 25-year-old urban audience than any other. As a result, albums even by established artists come and go with surprising speed, and visibility becomes nearly as important as airplay. A&M Records wanted to spur sales/awareness of Respect, the fifth album by basketball player/recording artist Shaquille O’Neal, and the first on TWisM, a new subsidiary label. For help, the firm turned to counselor Sarah Goldman. She explains the promotion’s three elements: “First, the title was part of the message Shaq wanted to convey to kids – for them to be confident, with a can-do attitude. Second, to underline this, the album had no bad language or violent themes. Third, to reach urban kids directly, A&M wanted to augment radio, TV and newspaper ads with something more immediately visible.”

The solution? A series of 7-inch round magnets resembling CDs, each with a photo of O’Neal, the title, and both label’s logos. Magnets were chosen instead of stickers because the latter are difficult to remove and had generated complaints from many neighborhoods. Thus, a removable entity was also a visual form of “respect” for public and private property, says Goldman.

A total of 75,000 magnets were sent to music-promotion agencies nationwide, in quantities ranging anywhere from 100 to 300. Marketing teams handed them out near schools, movie theaters and other urban locations. Some went to local radio stations; others were simply placed on newspaper boxes, poles and mailboxes, the idea being that young people seeing them would take the disks and affix then to their cars, school lockers or refrigerators. In all, Goldman says, the custom-shaped promotional magnets accomplished precisely what A&M had hoped – they generated awareness of the album and, more importantly, helped spur sales.