In the lead-up to her latest release, the six-song EP “She Is Coming,” Miley Cyrus wanted to do something a little different.
So the singer and her team took a wrecking ball to the usual promotional approach, masterminding a marketing campaign consisting of social media, out-of-home displays and a dedicated hotline that lets fans connect with her.
“Call me. I dare you,” the star wrote on Twitter.
Cyrus launched 1-833-SHE-IS-MC (1-833-743-4762), a hotline operated by telephonic marketing company Superphone. Fans can call the number and, after confirming they are over the age of 18 via keypad, hear a variety of quirky pre-recorded messages from the singer as well as clips of unreleased music. At the end of the message, callers are invited to record a voicemail for Cyrus.
To create her out-of-home campaigns, Cyrus used MilkMoney, a mobile-based media-buying platform that allows clients to produce their own ads with major outdoor advertising vendors, giving the customer control of the process from spearheading a campaign’s design to selecting the target demographics and cities where an ad will be displayed.
“For digital, the whole campaign was managed in 24 hours. For the static units, it was about one week,” says MilkMoney CEO and founder Sam Keywanfar, noting that the “She Is Coming” campaign was largely orchestrated by Cyrus herself. “She selected a wide variety of format types and the idea was to use each medium to reach a different type of [consumer] profile. It was all very strategic.”
The four-week hotline campaign, which began running in six markets (Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, New York and London) after the EP’s release on May 31, has so far received more than one million calls and texts from fans around the world and registered roughly 100 million earned impressions across social media.
On her Twitter account prior to the EP’s release, Cyrus, who boasts nearly 43 million followers, shared fan-made versions of her album’s cover art along with plain-text teaser images that read “She Is Coming 5/31,” which helped to drive social engagement.
After the hotline’s debut on June 3, Cyrus continued to share fans’ posts of her pink 1-833-SHE-IS-MC ads, which included billboards, bus wraps, digital newsstands and even an electronic screen floating off of Miami Beach on a digital advertising barge.
Cyrus also hyped various international versions of the hotline on social media, listing “She Is Coming” phone numbers in a variety of languages for callers in Australia, Canada, Peru, Poland, Singapore, Spain and the United Kingdom.
“She Is Coming” is the first of three six-song EPs that are slated for release throughout 2019; “She Is Here” and “She Is Everything” will round out the trio to eventually form “She Is Miley Cyrus,” the singer’s first studio album since 2017.
In addition to the audio and out-of-home ads, Cyrus is promoting “She Is Coming” with limited-edition merchandise available through her website, including branded T-shirts, hoodies and even condoms—all of which come bundled with a digital download of the EP.
