When we started working with Lil Wayne in mid-2013, he had very strong followings on both Twitter and Facebook but had no YouTube channel or official presence in the video space. His management team, The Blueprint Group, was interested in developing a more engaged audience around Lil Wayne’s visual content and was also seeking marketing collateral to promote ticket sales and VIP experiences for his upcoming European tour. Lil Wayne’s previous European dates had been thwarted due to unforeseen and unavoidable circumstances, so the management team needed to find an intimate and genuine way to instill confidence in his fans across the water.
To meet these objectives, we created Lil Wayne’s official YouTube channel from scratch and worked with The Blueprint Group to develop an original web series entitled “Lil Wayne Tour Passport: #FromUStoEU”. This series was created to document the groundbreaking stage show that Lil Wayne was currently touring America with and preparing to bring to the United Kingdom. Primarily focused around the touring production staff and containing less than 10 seconds of on-air screen time featuring new footage of Wayne, the series achieved over 600k views.
Based off of the success of the Lil Wayne Tour Passport series, we launched a more intensive weekly series entitled Weezy Wednesday that helped amass a much larger group of fans and subscribers on Wayne’s channel. A personal glimpse into the behind-the-scenes life of Lil Wayne, the Weezy Wednesday series has earned over 33MM views and 1.7MM hours of watch time to date. Across these two original series, the videos on Lil Wayne’s official channel have received over 397k clicks on annotations that link out to his priority marketing objectives including sales of concert tickets, merchandise, and VIP experiences.
In addition to Lil Wayne’s original series we’ve released exclusive interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, singles from upcoming records, and full mixtapes on Lil Wayne’s official channel. Through our Content ID operations we’ve claimed and monetized tens of thousands of fan-uploaded videos containing Lil Wayne’s content, all of which drives traffic back to his official channel and music videos. All said and done, Lil Wayne’s channel has earned over 12.1B views and gained over 12MM subscribers.
