By Adam Rappoport, Eva Schenck & Team

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Background: 

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Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductees, The Band got their start in the early 60s as The Hawks before gaining notoriety as the backing band for Bob Dylan’s first ever electric tour in 1966.  The Band’s crowning achievement was their farewell concert, which took place at the historic Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving Eve in 1976, and saw many special guests from Muddy Waters to Joni Mitchell, Ringo Starr to Neil Young, join The Band on iconic songs like “The Weight,” “Up on Cripple Creek” and “Helpless.”  This show was captured by Martin Scorcese and is forever immortalized in the concert film, “The Last Waltz.” 

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Mainfactor was engaged to revive the iconic brand of “The Last Waltz” through unique product designs and a marketing strategy to reach fans of The Band across the globe.  This new approach to The Band’s merchandise and associated digital marketing was launched just ahead of Black Friday 2023. 

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Strategy: 

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Mainfactor designed and developed a dedicated "The Last Waltz" e-commerce Shopify store with a fresh approach to product design. Our team partnered with Iconoclasts, The Band’s rightsholders, in creating a diverse offering featuring “if you know you know” designs including our best selling product, a tee shirt which features the iconic phrase rolled during the credits of the film “This Film Should be Played Loud.”  Subsequent designs featured the traditional Last Waltz logo and other IYKYK designs surrounding a “The Weight” capsule that coincided with the song being used in a Budweiser Super Bowl commercial. 

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Approach:

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Our D2C drops were timed to correlate with meaningful anniversaries and moments from throughout The Band’s career.  We released the first capsule during the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday with custom marketing assets and video from The Last Waltz coinciding with the release of new products. Our latest drop was released 3 days before the Super Bowl, with digital ads running through Super Bowl weekend to capitalize on the big moment for the song, “The Weight.” Creative assets were used across socials and in digital advertisements targeting The Band’s most qualified audiences - People who engage, visit or like their social pages, fans of related artists, site visitors to the page, email lists and more. Each product includes a custom “The Last Waltz” neck-label to further emphasize the exclusive nature of these products while giving fans more reason to seek and collect the official merchandise instead of knockoffs. 

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Outcome: 

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The Last Waltz store has been open for ~6 months as of this writing we’ve seen a great initial response from fans who have long clamored for insider designs to match their super-fandom. Our team is also working on a variety of exciting potential collaborations and marketing campaigns to ensure all fans of The Band are aware of the new store and each limited edition merch drop. The aforementioned “This Film Should be Played Loud” is the best-selling design store wide, with similar future drops planned around other memorable moments from their Hall of Fame career. 

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Check out The Band's official "The Last Waltz" Shop Now!

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