Soul Driver
HAND was approached by photographer Tony Briggs and independent publisher Countdown Books to design a photo-book to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the British band Ocean Colour Scene.
Tony was the bands photographer from 1995-1999, the Britpop years when the band was at the height of their international career which saw them release three top 10 albums and support Oasis at Knebworth.
Tony was commissioned by the record company to follow the band everywhere for four years… and as a result, he had thousands of unseen photos. Yep, thousands…
We were given all the digital photos and boxes full of original (film) photographs, proof sheets, trannies and negatives… Our job was to turn four years worth of jumbled images into interesting content that was organised and handsome. We worked closely with the client to select photos and get them all in a chronological order.
Photography by Tony Briggs
A photographic journal
We created the campaign brand for the book in keeping with the bands Mod heritage. Soul Driver (an OCS song title) would tell a photographic story with snippets of dialogue and memories running intertwined. At 224 pages a flexible grid was required to allow for pace to the multiple image compositions. We opted to start and end the book in full colour with a black and white section in the middle for the bands story. Detailed quality control and artworking was essential with such a content heavy project and our team ensured that not one error was made throughout.
Promo the demo
Tony was to put on an temporary exhibition for the book launch at his studios in Holborn which would also be the venue for the book launch party. HAND designed all the promotional collateral and invites across digital and print.
Part of our promotional strategy included creating a 25pp demo/promo version of the book to send to booksellers with a view to securing advance retail orders.
Our email marketing was a success and achieved posts on many popular culture related blogs – allowing us to utilise more than 100k individual post views. We also exploited Facebook and Twitter heavily to promote the book launch night on social media.
As a direct result of our promotional strategy HMV placed an order right away and the guest list for the exhibition/book launch party was filled easily.
A sound job
The launch night was a huge success with members of the band attending and early sales of the book exceeded the predicted return on investment expectations. There are some great customer reviews on Amazon – it gets 5/5. – which is all good news for Tony and OCS and something to sing about for us at HAND. Oh-oh la la!
Soul Driver is available on Amazon
