Adrenaline Magazine
Debuting a fresh music magazine for Gen-Z.
Overview.
Adrenaline is the hottest new music magazine. Established at the end of 2024, their mission has been to offer the younger generation an engaging, authentic and informed platform of music, entertainment and arts content.
The magazine is made for music lovers, by music lovers - entirely made up from contributors across the United Kingdom.
Role: Marketing Lead
Sector: Arts & Culture
Agency: N/A
Brief.
To celebrate the first successful year as an online-first publication, Adrenaline wanted to celebrate in style with a limited-run printed magazine.
With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), online-only content and a growing nostalgia for ‘Y2K’, it seemed a no-brainer.
Over the past few years, physical media has made a welcome comeback, as consumers yearn for something tangible. Something they actually own. This magazine would be the same unique, fresh and youthful perspective as always, but in a collectable format.
In September, the magazine pieced together a team with the aims of designing, marketing and selling a magazine by the end of the year.
Response.
Working to fast-paced timelines, and as the Marketing Lead, our strategy was streamlined to the fundamentals. Three months to create a print magazine entirely and sell it? There was no time to ponder - every part of our plan had to be tangible and flow seamlessly from department to department. The Music PR industry is notoriously last-minute, for various reasons, and this uncertainty also needed to be factored into our plan.
I split our response into 5 key stages:
Brand - Identifying a mission, vision, personas, tone of voice and KPI’s.
Content Pillars - Creating pillars for content to remain consistent and on-brand.
Ideation - Mapping ideas to content pillars and labelling which KPI it achieves.
Content - Crafting the core content across Instagram and TikTok, in advance, where possible.
AOB - Leaving space for ad-hoc collaborations, press coverage and spontaneous content.
The tone of voice that the magazine wanted to convey really stuck out to me (trusted, community, authentic and human). Alongside our content pillars, they definitely informed the posts we wanted to create:
Trusted - Genuine (and vetted) opinions and research in the magazine itself.
Community - Collaborations with fan accounts, being engaged on socials and creating a real buzz.
Authentic - Leaning into Kyle’s (owner) personal narrative as an inspiring piece of content.
Human - Discouraging the use of AI in content, and also showing our team faces!
Our marketing campaign spanned four weeks, started with several cryptic anagrams and teasers, before announcing the cover star (James Marriott) in collaboration with several fan accounts, reaching thousands of people within minutes. Each artist involved in the print had content created around them, and our team also got live fan reactions of the cover at Marriott’s Roundhouse show in London.
Results.
Sell 250 copies of the magazine - Sold Out + 100 pre-orders in 24 hours
Grow social following by 10% - Increased by 21%
Boost awareness of the publication - Waiting list demand for a second wave (page view stats coming soon)
