Jackdaw

The Brief

After working with CHEERIO Publishing on the organic social media campaign for their first book, ‘Bacon in Moscow’, the exciting independent publishing imprint and production company invited us to collaborate with them again on the promotion of ‘Jackdaw’ by Tade Thompson, an author best known for his award-winning science-fiction novels.

‘Jackdaw’ is a bold work of literary fiction centred around a psychiatrist hired to write a short piece on Francis Bacon. In his attempts to understand the artist and research the characters around him, his grip on reality becomes increasingly tenuous, his state of mind less reliable and he’s haunted by disturbing figures.

The Campaign

Following a kick off call with CHEERIO, the PR team and the digital marketing specialists, we began to develop the creative style and content plan. The assets were designed to draw on the collage style of the cover artwork, using the author’s own drawings and incorporating engrossing animations/interactive elements to reflect the changing mindset of the main character and draw the users’ attention. The layered and moving imagery also introduced the user to the book’s world which blurred the line between fiction and reality.

For the overall campaign, we planned a two-pronged approach that would both advertise the content of the book as well as a behind-the-scenes element that would showcase more of the team and the process that brought ‘Jackdaw’ to print including ‘in conversations’ with the editors and an interview with the author. This content acted as an exclusive insight for CHEERIO’s audience and the posts saw some of the highest engagement across the campaign.

Though we planned most of the campaign in advance, we maintained flexibility with the calendar as reactive content for press, reviews, events and other announcements needed to be worked in. Additionally, as the campaign was posted across three social media platforms, it was important to recognise what content worked best on each channel and what CHEERIO’s audience engaged most with. By continuing to adapt the campaign based on the learnings from these metrics, we could increase the reach of the campaign and remain relevant to the existing audience’s interests. In line with this goal, we also contacted and confirmed reviews with several Bookstagrammers to boost the book to wider, interested audiences post-publication.

The overall campaign for ‘Jackdaw’ ignited curiosity, sparked discussions, and captivated followers, generating a great buzz in the literary community for the book.