EMI hires ad agency Saatchi
Struggling EMI Group, the world’s fourth-largest record label, has hired the Los Angeles office of global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi to help market its music.
The move, announced Tuesday, comes as music labels are trying to tackle declining sales and two weeks after EMI accepted a buyout offer from private equity group Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd.
Saatchi’s assignment is to come up with new ways to sell some of EMI’s older titles, including the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra and the Rolling Stones.
“They can help us market our existing repertoire in new and different ways and find new and different ways to reach the consumer,” said Ronn Werre, president of EMI Music Marketing. “Our view is to have somebody come in with a fresh perspective.”
Werre said EMI had seen new opportunities since it became the first major label to sell music free of copyright restrictions in May, giving it the ability to “create a record store wherever the consumer is right now,” he said.
Album sales industrywide from January to July slipped 15% from the same period last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan data.
As consumers eschew albums for single tracks they can purchase online, music labels increasingly need to sell their older and niche titles rather than just focus on blockbusters, said Aram Sinnreich, a senior analyst at Radar Research. That means marketing certain albums to smaller markets.
“There’s no question that new modes of music distribution require new forms of music marketing,” Sinnreich said.
Saatchi has experience with new-media marketing, including gaming, mobile and the Internet, said Mark Turner, chief strategy officer of the agency’s Los Angeles office. Turner said Saatchi would help EMI find ways to boost consumer awareness of its catalog and connect listeners emotionally with the artists.
It’s unusual for a label to hire an outside agency to help market a whole catalog, said Eric Hirshberg, president and chief creative officer of Deutsch Inc. in Los Angeles. Although the music and advertising industries have worked together in the past to place music in commercials, mostly, he said, “it’s the music world getting involved in the advertising world’s problems.”
“This is a new idea,” he said. “The marketing world is getting involved in the music world’s problems.”
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