Bacon in Moscow

CHEERIO Publishing’s Bacon in Moscow is a memoir telling the fascinating tale of curator James Birch’s quest to take the works of Francis Bacon to the USSR in 1988.

The CHEERIO team approached us to support the promotion of the book by creating a dedicated campaign across their existing social media channels.

To kick off the project, we had a brainstorming session with CHEERIO in which we discussed the key themes, narrative and background of the book. It was vital for us to understand how CHEERIO wanted to communicate the book on social media before we developed the content and creative style. This meeting also helped us define the audience and KPIs for the campaign.

Moving to the development stage of the project, we set out how we would approach the promotion of the book. For content, we chose to play into the chronological narrative by teasing the timeline to CHEERIO’s audience. Our content themes focused on the historical setting of the memoir and ‘the untold story’ behind the creation of a ground-breaking exhibition. Our aim was to pitch this book to the audience as an incredible insight into the work that went into staging the show, the characters James Birch met along the way and his relationship with Francis Bacon, the man behind the paintings.

The creative style played into this approach by incorporating the author’s personal collection of photographs and letters into the design. Because of the 1980s setting of the book and the Russian focus, we drew inspiration from the typography style and colours of Soviet propaganda posters for the visual assets. The visual style for the book promotion content ensured that the campaign stood out against CHEERIO’s branded posts.

A key partner for this project was Riot Communications, the PR agency managing the promotion of the book. Throughout the campaign, we maintained regular communication with both CHEERIO and Riot so that the fantastic reviews and promotional events for Bacon in Moscow were amplified across the channels. We also introduced a mini-campaign for the audiobook, narrated by Richard E. Grant, as the audio content lent itself well to short videos.

The campaign received over half a million impressions, with regular positive feedback from both the client and CHEERIO’s social media following. The book was also incredibly well-received by readers and reviewers in the press.