Lewis Capaldi’s PR team have told Music Week how widespread affection for the singer continues to drive consumption of his music.
Fifteen months after its release, Capaldi’s second album continues to make an impact, with Love The Hell Out Of You featuring as the theme song to the newly released It Ends With Us.
Starring Blake Lively - who said “there was only one song for this moment” - the film has hit cinemas as Capaldi’s Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent motors towards the 300,000 sales mark in the UK.
MBC PR/DawBell/APB PR jointly won the PR Campaign category at this year’s Music Week Awards for their work on Lewis Capaldi across print and online, and members of the team highlighted the importance of balancing high demand for the singer with his own wellbeing.
Capaldi spoke in his Music Week cover feature at the end of 2022 about his experience in dealing with Tourette’s and mental health issues, something which shaped the kind of PR campaign the team could build.
Lewis always knows just what he wants to say
Ant Giannaccini, MBCPR
“I don’t think anyone in the team had ever been involved in something quite like that before, " said MBCPR’s Ant Giannaccini, who worked on the print side. “Essentially, we sat down with Lewis and his management team and it was very much, ‘How do you want to play this?’ It was about listening to what he wanted to do and being there to guide him through it and help him say things in the way he wanted to. What we learned was that he always knows what he wants to say, but it was sometimes about just chatting to him and the team and making sure it was alright.”
Lewis Fromberg (who has since moved to Red Bull UK) led the online campaign for DawBell.
“The thing with Lewis, if it was up to him, he would do anything and everything, he wants to please people,” said Fromberg. “We minimised it and said, ‘Your health has to come first.’”
“It’s very hard telling an artist to pull back on certain things,” said Giannaccini. “It was about managing it. You have to listen to the artist, so it was about finding the middle ground between what he needed (health-wise) and what he wanted to do.”
It was about harnessing ideas where you’re not just relying on interviews to generate awareness
Lewis Fromberg
Fromberg highlighted the importance of thinking beyond the borders of what constitutes a traditional press campaign in order to scale back the demands on Capaldi’s time.
“We wanted to create press moments that didn’t necessarily involve Lewis as much, but would still have PR value,” he said. “We worked with his old school for over six to eight months to create a statue of Lewis. The unveiling would involve five or 10 minutes of his time, he wouldn’t have to do any interviews and the statue itself would generate PR. It was about harnessing ideas like that where you’re not just relying on an interview to generate awareness.”
He added: “The statue was unveiled around album week when we wanted all eyes on Lewis, and that’s the value of a good PR campaign, not just to rely on big interviews, especially with someone like Lewis where we had to be careful with how much we were putting in front of him.”
When it came to long-form print interviews, MBCPR’s plan was to stick to the tried and tested.
“It was about putting Lewis in front of people that we trust and also that he trusts and had spoken to before,” said Giannaccini. “There were a few people that he’d spoken to before on the previous album that he felt safe with and we’d identified as people he’d feel comfortable sitting down and talking to. That was important, because if he felt comfortable he could actually tell a story properly.”
With Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly sent on 289,235 sales to date according to the Official Charts Company, and its predecessor on 1,709,918, the story is far from over.
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