TOURdeBUS

The business problem

Artist relations at Zvuk was being built from scratch. The priority was bringing fan communities into the service through artist partnerships, exclusive content and news hooks. The new team had no completed projects behind it, no benchmarks and no launch process to work from.

I proposed trading a resource the artist genuinely needed for her participation in a product mechanic and in promoting Zvuk. The hypothesis: backing a concert tour would give the brand access to engaged audiences city by city, while exclusive content and prizes from the artist would give fans a reason to open the app.

The bus as the basis of the partnership

Elli's team offered to brand a rented vehicle in exchange for covering the rental. By then I had audited Zvuk's assets and found a company-owned bus, outfitted for touring but used mostly as a mobile billboard around Moscow.

I matched the artist's request to an asset we already had. Zvuk provided the transport for the tour, and the partnership was rounded out with communication from the artist, exclusive content and an in-app mechanic for her listeners.

The poster and the tour section in Zvuk

I built the mechanic around meeting the artist: before the show a fan added her playlist to their library in Zvuk and collected a poster; after the set, Elli signed it in person. The action inside the service bought something fans actually wanted — an extension of the concert itself.

Inside the app I put together a dedicated tour section: a playlist of the setlist, an audio interview, and stories with her poetry and facts about her. The section gave the audience something to explore in Zvuk and a reason to keep listening.

A first launch with no process in place

The hard part was standing up a brand-new format while my group was still being hired. I was negotiating, designing the user journey and preparing the bus for a long-distance tour all at the same time.

I arranged the technical inspection, the driver's schedule, fuel and toll payments, hotels in the tour cities, the vehicle wrap and the poster print run. I coordinated all of it while preparing the content for the in-app section and the media plan. Nothing had been documented, because I had invented the format from scratch, so I was building the working order as the first launch went along, on my own judgment.

Promotion and measurement

The media plan covered posts from the artist and from Zvuk, placements in media and Telegram channels, and promotion inside the app. The artist had her own tagged link, which we used to follow click-throughs and what users did next.

We measured installs, return sessions, subscriptions and streams, and inside the product, consumption of the tour section. Passers-by seeing the bus and the fan-generated content could not be counted reliably, so I based product conclusions only on trackable user actions.

Team

I owned the partnership, the mechanic, the logistics, the structure of the section, the promotion and the reporting. I set tasks for colleagues in other teams and coordinated their preparation for launch.

The business problem

Zvuk needed a steady flow of visible projects that brought artists' audiences into the service. Planning mainly around album releases made that unpredictable: dates moved, and the big releases clustered in the periods with the fiercest competition for attention and marketing resources — the end of the year above all.

I proposed building partnerships around tours, which are scheduled well in advance. The hypothesis: a clear touring calendar would give us a more stable basis for preparation, while an artist with an active fandom and media weight would generate interest in the project. And by then we had the Elli na Makovom Pole case to put on the table in negotiations.

Choosing the artist for the job

I set the selection criteria: media interest in the artist, and how willing his audience would be to take part in the mechanic we were proposing. With the manager I went through Markul's social channels, his coverage in traditional and new media, and his listeners' activity in Zvuk.

I built the partnership offer around the tour bus and promotion of the artist inside the service. The tour route let us tie communication to specific cities and dates. In preparation we checked the logistics and whether his touring schedule fit the bus's availability.

A merch hunt inside the tour

We developed the creative mechanic together with the artist. After each show Markul hid merch somewhere in the city, and the coordinates appeared in his dedicated section in Zvuk. Fans opened the app to find out the location and go and collect the prize in their own city.

I paired the mechanic with content that kept interest in the section alive for the length of the tour: playlists of the artist's own favorite music, photos from the bus and from backstage. Toward the end of the tour we added unreleased demos and asked listeners to vote for their favorite.

I built in different reasons to come back over the course of the campaign. The merch hunt was tied to a specific show, while the music and visual content widened the interaction beyond it.

Launching with a new team

At this stage the task was to hand the format to someone who had only just started in the role. I kept the key decisions with me, and ran the negotiations, the artist selection and the creative development jointly with him.

The manager handled operational preparation and worked with contributors from other teams. I stayed with the project at every stage and signed off on the result. That arrangement carried the hands-on experience of the first launch into the new team's way of working.

Promotion and comparison with the pilot

The campaign combined Markul's posts with tagged links, Zvuk's social channels, and push notifications, stories and banners inside the app. Press coverage and Telegram placements carried the news hook further.

For the evaluation I compared click-throughs, attributed streams on the promo playlists, project costs and the volume of in-app support against the first TOURdeBUS with Elli na Makovom Pole. I tracked follower growth on the artist's Zvuk page separately. The comparison let me judge the two launches against each other while allowing for the differences in audience size, mechanics and tour length.

Team

I owned the choice of partner, the concept, the project decisions and the result. I handed day-to-day running to the manager, while we kept working on the negotiations and the creative together.

The business problem

After the launches with Elli na Makovom Pole and Markul, Zvuk had a working format for artist partnerships. It brought listeners into the service, but preparing each project still took a great deal of hands-on involvement from me, which capped how many launches the team could run.

The priority became scaling the format with a more predictable workload — for my own team and for contributors in other departments. I proposed locking down the repeatable stages and using the next tour as a test of whether the manager could run one independently. The hypothesis: an agreed process would preserve the user mechanic and the content while reducing the dependence on me.

Choosing the artist and the mechanic

We needed an artist whose tour matched the bus's free dates. That partner was Kuok. His audience was smaller than Markul's, so I treated the project first and foremost as a test of the process and of the team's independence.

The merch hunt stayed at the core: after each show, Zvuk published the coordinates of the gifts the artist had hidden. The dedicated section also carried a podcast, photos and playlists, so fans had reasons to open the app both to join in and to spend time with the artist's content.

Handing the project to the manager

The main difficulty was how far the launch depended on my constant involvement: agreements, deadlines and cross-team work all needed manual coordination. I pulled together the experience from the earlier projects and wrote up the working order, from artist sign-off to final analytics.

I broke delivery into blocks: partner selection, logistics costing, mechanic design, section and content preparation, communications plan, promotion and reporting. Logistics accounted separately for fuel, tolls, the driver's accommodation and his working hours. For each block I defined the stages, the tasks and the owners.

Tasks were assigned in Jira, and I agreed the deadlines with contributors in other teams. The manager tracked delivery, ran weekly syncs and reported on progress. I kept the agreed readiness checks and the final presentation of results.

Optimization and the choice of comparison baseline

Using analytics from the earlier projects, I cut activities that consumed significant resources for minimal return. I revised the scope of work for my own team and for the other departments: design, editorial, PR, social, CRM, producers and product. The core fan mechanic and the content of the section stayed.

In the post-mortem I noted the flaw in my approach: I had optimized against data from the most recent launch with Markul, when Kuok's audience was in fact closer in size to Elli's — and in that first project, consumption of content inside the section had been much stronger. So the conclusion for future launches was to choose the mix of activities using data from a comparable artist, and to weigh a fandom's engagement alongside its size.

Team

I owned the design of the process, the optimisation, the agreed deadlines and the control points. The manager owned operational delivery: assigning tasks, coordinating contributors, keeping to deadlines and pulling together the reporting.