Ed Seeran's Eyes Closed
Ed Sheeran's 'Subtract' wasn't a typical album launch. It was his most personal record, written through grief, fear, and a wife's cancer diagnosis. The India campaign needed to match that emotional weight while reaching beyond the existing fanbase into the wider pop culture conversation.
Year
2024
Scope
Music Video Campaign
Client
Warner Music India
Duration
2 Months
Ed Sheeran 'Subtract' Campaign
Two objectives drove everything: create a personal connection for existing fans, and use cultural moments to pull in a broader audience.
What I designed
The entire visual language for the India campaign, presentation decks, campaign assets, social creatives, and the collateral across every activation. The design system used cut-out photography with yellow borders, typewriter-style type, and a raw textured background, deliberately lo-fi to match the album's honest, unpolished tone. Nothing glossy. Everything felt like it came from a journal.
The Activations
The campaign ran across three moments, a cross-brand collab with a food delivery platform that brought the Blue Monster to Indian audiences and sparked a viral Twitter thread that pulled in other major brands and got a direct response from Ed Sheeran himself, a Yellow Diary Contest that let fans win a physical piece of the album's story, and an exclusive listening party for 300 superfans before the album dropped publicly. Each activation had its own creative direction but lived in the same visual world.
39 million+ impressions. 13 million streams. 300 superfans at the listening party.
The visual decisions
The yellow cut-out treatment came from the album's visual world, the Subtract artwork, the yellow diary, the raw emotional texture of the record. Keeping that thread consistent across every touchpoint, from a 16:9 deck slide to a phone-sized Instagram story, was the core design challenge.
The typewriter font was a deliberate call. It pushed against the polished, gradient-heavy aesthetic typical of major label campaigns. For an album this personal, the design needed to feel handmade.
The result
A campaign that worked across two audiences at once deep fans who got exclusive, personal moments, and a wider pop culture audience pulled in through the Swiggy collab. The numbers followed because the creative logic was right.
The campaign won the Silver Award for Best Music Video Marketing Campaign at the e4m Play Streaming Media Awards 2024, recognised alongside campaigns from Viacom18, Coke Studio Tamil, and Disney+ Hotstar.
