Inside Ed Sheeran’s Tingly Ted’s campaign and the art of great artist & brand partnerships

Bob Workman, head of WMX (Warner Music Experience), artist and fan experience, SVP international artists and brand partners, has spoken to Headliner about Ed Sheeran’s new Tingly Ted’s hot sauce campaign with The Kraft Heinz Company, as well as the increasing demand for brand partnerships from artists today, and what makes for a great collaboration.

Last month, Sheeran and Heinz launched a new hot sauce branded Tingly Ted’s. The collaboration marked the culmination of over 18 months of work between Heinz and WMX’s Ventures division, a newly launched arm designed to offer artists and brands the opportunity to look through the lens of legacy, beyond music.

The campaign represented one of the most high-profile artist-brand partnerships to date for WMX, with artists of all levels seeking out ever new and innovative ways to connect with audiences.

To find out more about the art of great artist and brand partnerships, Headliner sat down with Workman to talk Tingly Ted’s, the opportunities available to artists beyond their music, and more…

Tell us about the recently launched WMX Ventures. What is its purpose?

Ventures is rooted within the overall WMX business, which is everything beyond recorded music, how we help our artists build their brand and build a legacy beyond what might be perceived as the limitations of recorded music. I’ve for many years been running the artist and brand partners part of Warner Music in the UK and WMX Ventures grew out of that, because we still have a really strong partnerships offering which is essentially where we are looking to build creative collaborations with brands. But where there is a pre-existing brief or an opportunity that comes in from a brand, we try to get that into shape and negotiate the terms and build a partnership. And then we facilitate that partnership to the degree that we help the artist involved to build the best outcomes.

Off the back of that we built a creative arm which was really intended to ensure that we could drive the agenda for insight driven campaigns, because often when you have incoming campaigns they don’t necessarily fit the brief for our artists. And often we would see campaigns coming in from really brilliant companies that were just not speaking to the artist proposition or their fans. So we felt we needed a bit more skin in that game and have more of a say in the campaign ideation space.

We decided to invest in some creative talent in-house. That was partly triggered by a brief we had from Levi’s a couple of years back and we ended up running their music project for them. It required creative agency style work. It’s rooted in music and in the broader ecosystem of music, but it’s ad industry style creative work, which is not something you typically find in a music company. So we built WMX Ventures out of the desire to give our artists the opportunity to create legacy beyond music. I’ve always been quite passionate about the idea that Warner Music as an overall business Is like a big engagement engine.

How does the pairing of artist and brand work?

It can start from either end of the spectrum. We spend a lot of time with our artists. We have an onboarding process for artists when they sign to the company and that’s where we find out what they are really about and get to know the person behind the music. And we respect the fact that our artists will often have other adjacent passions. Some are very single minded about the music, and we’ll just leave them to crack on and do that, but if you look at the artists we’ve worked with over the years, a lot of them are likely to be vocal about the football team they support or the latest fashion item that they’ve been bought or been gifted.

Data and insights are really vital for us. The fans and communities that exist around our artists are a big driving force and we are really aware of what those fans and communities want from the artists. The values proposition is really vital because values driven marketing campaigns are everywhere these days, and rightly so for many positive reasons, so it may be that there is a values piece at the heart of it. What we are always looking for is a central truth that exists behind a coming together of any kind.

In the case of Ed, he really loves hot sauce. He’s been growing chillies in his greenhouse in Suffolk, he happens to know more about chillies than anyone I’ve ever met, so you have an authentic platform there and a truth from which he can start talking and developing something.

Equally, when Coldplay talk about wanting to tour more sustainably, they are deadly serious about that and they have spent a fortune on people and activities to make a meaningful impact. They feel it’s something they have to do as a leading touring artist. So there is a truth and a platform so they have gained some sort of license to operate in that field.

Sometimes we have a particular idea from an artist that suits a particular category of brand and we make sure we go to the right brand, and sometimes it’s the other way around with a brand looking for an artist – sometimes we try to change the brief because we know there is a better way of doing things so that it works better for a particular artist. Getting down to how things execute and doing the right deals is something we are very particular about. And historically we have made mistakes. We’ve been at this for a long time and put our hands up and say there are things we did five years ago that we wouldn’t do the same way today.

Are artists exploring these opportunities more actively than ever before?

Yes, for sure. Even our very biggest artists. The level of interest is greater than ever. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the amount of business being done is correspondingly bigger because you still have to be prepared to say no as much as you might say yes, or more so. We have to be really sure we are doing the right thing. But generally, there is heightened interest being driven by the fact artists are more savvy, and agencies and brands are more savvy. The outcomes of these projects have to educate, inform and perhaps most importantly, entertain people, so it’s really important to delight people with engaging, interesting, funny content. That’s the duty we have. And the proliferation of social media platforms changed everything. The levels and speed of engagement suddenly became very attractive to a lot of brands.

Are artists in general more entrepreneurial today, bringing their own ideas to the table?

It varies. Certainly there are some artists that are highly entrepreneurial and interested in building their own brand. It’s not for everyone and some artists are just focused on music and performance, but increasingly we are having these conversations and they are increasingly interesting conversations. At their best they are coming from a place where an artist is particularly interested in something, be it fashion or whatever, and you know there is some bandwidth and commitment from them.

Some artists you’d look at and think they should set up their own beauty brand right now, for example, yet we are having conversations with them where they are saying they need two more years of really focusing on music and then we’ll get round to this. They want to make sure that when they do it they can give it their all. There are artists of course who will lend their IP and influence to a product development. And that’s fine too, it’s just a different dynamic and they might be slightly less involved and have less ownership of the brands. But those who do want to own it have to own the process, own the communications. It’s just a different level of commitment.

We’ve been amazed at the commitment we’ve had from Ed; he just has unbelievable energy as an artist and a creative force, and he has the ability to multi-task. And one of the things we had to think about really carefully was how do we fit into his world without being too disruptive? While it was something he wanted to do and he started the conversation, we don’t want to disrupt his music career. His commitment is what’s ultimately driven a great outcome.

How meticulous is the process behind these campaigns, particularly with artists of such stature as Ed Sheeran, as the stakes are very high if the campaign doesn’t land in the way it’s intended?

If we ever stopped to really consider what we were risking we might not have gone forward with some of these things! Tingly Ted’s started from a place of Ed Having an idea, something he wanted to do, and he was quite clear from the off about his vision. We were able to spend a significant of time with him to extract that vision. Kraft Heinz were in our corner who are an amazing partner and understand the food and grocery industry, so we didn’t have to worry about our lack of knowledge of hot sauces and condiments as we had such expertise in our corner. So, it left us to make sure we were true to Ed’s vison and turned it into a visual brand that had with it all of the values and personality you need to establish a consumer brand.

We spent a lot of time working on that and creating a playbook and brand personality and values proposition. It takes a huge amount of preparation. And with no disrespect to all the partnerships work we do, this was a different level. It was about 18 months in development and it’s the level of commitment that you might see in the recorded music area. The rigour is just around research and testing and all of that stuff. In the case of Tingly Ted’s it was of course about getting the sauces right, which was a meticulous process of going backyards and forwards to Ed, giving him tasting tests, getting chefs in to cook the right foods to go with it, all of which is a really fine and exciting process when you know you are dealing with one of the great creative artists of our age. It’s worth the time and effort to get it right,

What does the launch of WMX Ventures say about the company’s commitment to these kinds of opportunities fir artists in the future?

It’s a huge statement about what we want to be as a business. We recognise that if you want to be in the 360 of an artist’s proposition it doesn’t just mean having a share of live revenue and being involved in merchandise. They are important and integral to our business, but the 360 of the artists is thinking about what we can bring when the artist isn’t thinking about music. What can we do to enhance their business life and the fan connection? What can we do to help an artist resonate and tell their stories in different settings? It’s a natural extension of what we were doing before. Engage more fans and build communities. It’s all self-perpetuating.