Taylor Swift recently announced the release of her new album “Midnights.” Swift has had a unique way of advertising for her most recent releases and re-releases in that she doesn’t do any advertising. She is so famous now that her lack of advertising only encourages her fans, “Swifties,” to talk even more about her upcoming projects and create conspiracy theories based on the hints she leaves in posts on her Instagram and the occasional TikToks that she posts.
With the abundance of advertising in everyday life, consumers are bombarded with so many messages they can’t remember everything they see or hear. Swift has chosen the opposite approach by leaving her listeners to their own devices and theorizing what activities she has in the works. She relies mostly on earned media to promote her music and this is very successful for her with the hashtag #taylorswifttheory being used 11.8 million times on TikTok.
Swift also makes her public appearances very sparse, so when she goes to an award show or gets caught by the paparazzi it feels preplanned and like it has an underlying message to it. She recently attended the VMA’s and used it as a form of free promotion to announce “Midnights.” Besides the normal cost of attending an event, this was the best form of publicity Swift could get with the event amassing 3.9 million viewers according to Billboard.
With the most recent rerelease of Swift’s rerecorded album, Red, one of her music videos garnered a lot of attention online from the use of color and supposed hidden numbers throughout the video. In the music video, I Bet You Think About Me it was theorized that a scene where she’s sitting at the kids’ table and pulls a rabbit out of a hat it was alluding to Alice in Wonderland. It was then connected to Harry Styles’ tour “Love on Tour” because his merchandise had two rabbits on it. In the same video, a wedding cake was said to hold many hidden messages. On the top tier of the wedding cake, the numbers 13 and 26 were scattered over the surface. It’s well known that Taylor Swift’s favorite number is 13 and the song I Bet You Think About Me is number 26 on the track, so those could be simple explanations. Fans also theorized that Swift would announce a new project on November 26th since the music video was released on November 15th. Another cake theory was when Swift had taken two fingers and dragged them into the cake to unveil the red cake on the inside. This motion formed what looked like an equal sign. Since Swift is friends with Ed Sheeran, fans predicted this could also hint at a new collaboration between Swift and Sheeran because of Sheeran’s most recent album “=.” There were many more “easter eggs” that Swift put in the music video and Popsugar does a good overview of a lot of them.
Very few people or brands can successfully employ this advertising campaign as Swift does. It takes a lot of skill, a popular product, or a good campaign to get to the point of no campaign. This music video gave Swift more publicity than potentially any campaign would have. This shows the success of Swift’s career and it’s very promising for her continued longevity as a singer.