“Music sits across every marketing demographic, it’s at the intersection of creativity and culture and artists have never been more influential,” he said, adding the record label was increasingly investing in creative and marketing talent to help artists extend their career lifetime.
Globally, WMX is stagged by 850 people led by president, and ex-Comcast CMO, Maria Weaver out of the U.S. There are 40 staffers in the U.K., including the Ventures team.
Sheeran’s hot sauce idea originally struck him during a meeting he had with the team at Heinz Tomato Ketchup (the logo of which he has tattooed on his arm as a superfan) about a limited 150th Anniversary edition the pair were partnering on.
“Ed piped up at the end of the call, saying ‘I’ve got an idea for a hot sauce’,” recalled Workman, “he had the name and sense of what he wanted to do already. That was the start of it, then our role was to facilitate that vision.”
Workman said the studio had taken a “proactive” approach to pairing musicians with established brands. However, he believed it was in a “uniquely close position” as a label to harvest “insights, anecdotes and stories” from artists that could spark the seed of an idea or product they could make their own.
“Musicians nowadays are polymaths, they’re as much photographers, filmmakers, sometimes actors or presenters and they’re also passionate about things that are adjacent to music, be it food or fashion,” he added.
Other projects WMX has already worked on include Oasis legend Liam Gallagher’s “LG Rambler” tie up with shoemaker Clarks that revives a special run of luxe leather classics, after Liam posted on Twitter that he loved the originals.
“That was grounds for us to put together an idea which had a creative play across it,” he said. “They sold out within hours, and that was proof there was a space in there for us, that our artists could design products and sell them.”
Sheeran is the sole owner of Teds, with the IP licensed to Heinz. Moving forward, however, with a model like WMX Ventures there could be scope for the label to invest in artists’ projects from the outset.
The secret sauce
Tapping into musicians’ move towards the creator economy via WMX and Ventures will, of course, help Warner Group diversity its own revenue streams in an increasingly competitive market that’s heavily reliant on live performances and streaming royalties.
In the last 18 months, more ad agencies have been entering the product development foray themselves too, with Truth Collective and Buzzman, which owns Productman, leading the pack. Workman acknowledged there was some crossover between the Ventures offerings and traditional ad agencies, but argued the “creative trust” between artist and label was the real secret sauce.
