Backstairs Billy
Duke of York's Theatre
Backstairs Billy directed by Michael Grandage starring none other than Luke Evans and the brilliantly timeless, Penelope Wilton was a play quite unique in it's own right – it was a brand new play making its debut in the West End. This is no easy feat considering theatreland in London is a massively commercial arena that can take a punch with even the faintest whisper of bad WOM (word of mouth). And with none of that to go on, we had our challenge served to us on a silver platter.
Written by the acclaimed Marcelo Dos Santos though, we were in good hands.
For the purposes of this project, I am going to focus on two key areas: content and branding. So read on to see how we did it.
Backstairs Billy ​ran from 27 October, 2023 – 27 January, 2024.
Campaign Objectives
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01
The Corgi Hook
Faced with the challenge of working on a brand new play making its West End debut, we had to apply some out-of-the-box thinking to frame this play as credible despite not having any reviews yet. The other obstacle we faced was an extremely challenging audience demographic – we had to think about how to target older audiences who love the royal family but are sceptical about new writing alongside younger audiences who are less interested in royals altogether. Through research and creative thinking, we found our solution: create an abundance of Corgi content.
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In understanding the nuances of our audience groups, we wanted to create content that was engaging but also reflected the powerful narrative of this new work.
02
Retro But Regal
With the launch of any show comes the most important pre-planning step of any marketing campaign: the artwork concept. We worked with our wonderful designers at AKA to create something that would reflect the political edginess of this story with a royal persona. Inspired Set by the setting of the play in the retro late 1980s, we ended up creating something pretty special.
How did we do it?​
The Queen's Corgis
Over the course of three days, I put together a shot list, hired a videographer and directed two videos to capture both the essence of the play as well as the wonder of live theatre through the POV of a Corgi – one designed for reels and one for long-form YouTube.
These videos then inspired a series of Corgi assets that we used across both organic platforms in addition to our digital marketing funnels and became one of the top performing assets across the campaign.
The result was highly shareable, emotionally resonant content that drove ticket sales and word of mouth buzz.
Punchy Artwork
We licensed an iconic, old photo of Billy and the Queen Mother and mocked up the artwork from there utilising that striking, regal purple to situate the play.
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Purple is surprisingly difficult to get right in print so we ran several print tests in house before going live with any newspaper ads, which are very much still an alive and well form of advertising.
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The artwork was adapted once we had our casting (featuring the real corgis who starred).
Fun fact: one of the Corgis was very naughty during our shoot dat (I mean, it's not easy doing 8 shows a week and dogs are notoriously very difficult to get angry with) so we actually had to photoshop the same Corgi in twice. Think she regretted that later, but I never got round to asking.