HOW STAGWELL CREATIVES HELPED JON BATISTE BUILD A FANTASTICAL VISUAL WORLD FOR HIS NEW ALBUM

Advertising creatives don’t often get a chance to try things outside their traditional lanes. But Doner and Wolfgang spread their wings recently with an extensive, colorful and experimental branding project for the musician Jon Batiste—who, it turns out, has struggled himself with many of the same issues of being pigeonholed by genres and labels while trying to expand into a more holistic approach to music.

The project arrived through Colin Jeffery, chief creative officer of both Stagwell agencies. (Stagwell acquired Wolfgang last fall and housed it in the Doner network.) Jeffery, who has long traveled in music circles and was a driving force behind Kia’s music-centered hamster ads years ago, met Batiste in 2019—and they immediately hit it off.

At the time, Batiste was already at work on “We Are,” which would go on to win five Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year in 2022. But he was excited by Jeffery’s ideas for building visual worlds inspired by music that would extend well beyond an album’s cover art—an expansive approach Batiste was also drawn to.

Their chance to work together finally arrived with the next record, “World Music Radio,” which was just released this month on Interscope Records/Verve Records.

It’s a concept album—a collection of pop songs that attempt to reframe the often-marginalized notion of “world music” through a character named Billy Bob Bo Bob (narrated by Batiste). Within the conceit of the 21-track album, Billy Bob is a DJ at “World Music Radio” who curates a collection of global songs (written by Batiste, many of them in collaboration with artists around the world) and transmits them to listeners with commentary.

For Jeffery and his team, it was a dream job to translate this conceptually rich musical creation into a whole visual world—and they used their advertising skills, while transcending them as well, to make it cohesive and compelling.

Credit: Interscope Records/Verve Records

The world of Billy Bob Bo Bob

In an interview with Ad Age, Batiste said the visual shape of “World Music Radio” began to cohere, in his mind’s eye, late in the process. The challenge then was communicating it to Jeffery and the team and begin developing imagery together.

“I feel like I’m making albums the same way a director makes a movie,” he said. “This album became a concept album in the late stages. And it really did require all hands on deck from the creative teams in terms of, how do you portray that to the world? The visuals carry a lot of the storytelling. And then it grows exponentially based on the input of the creative team when they get what you’re saying.”

Jeffery said the project was a chance to move beyond the typical visual storytelling found in a lot of label-driven album launches, which he often finds fragmented and underwhelming.

“The artist has a vision—they create the music. Then somebody’s brought in for the music video, someone else for the album art, someone else for the swag,” he said. “Talking to John, it was this idea of getting in early and understanding the vision and really trying to strengthen and support that vision—so that it’s not just the music, it’s the whole experience. Obviously the music is the anchor, but how do you make it cohesive so it feels like a campaign, like one big idea?” 

“Not to get down on [record] labels, but I just feel like labels aren’t built for that kind of feedback loop,” Batiste said. “To go all in on a project with this kind of conceptual and creative depth, you’ve got to have a creative partner.” 

Credit: Interscope Records/Verve Records

They began, simply enough, with a brain dump—working out the story of Billy Bob Bo Bob and his world, and in many ways going deeper than the music does.

“We laid out every single thing, even things you don’t hear on the album but inform things you hear on the album,” Batiste said. “The symbolism of characters that are part of the story, the main character Billy Bob Bo Bob’s backstory—we mapped out and storyboarded everything, as if we were going to make a film.”

Soon, the building blocks began to coalesce—the concept of branding the radio station itself, including a logo; the color palettes; the typography; the wardrobe for Billy Bob Bo Bob. All of it drew on different global cultural influences.

“The logo itself was designed to feel like an old music station,” Jeffery said. “The lightning bolt and the san serif fonts and the color palettes—it was all meant to feel retro. The colors came from looking at flags from around the world—the hard lines with triangles and squares. Once we felt good about that, the rest came quite easily. You’ve got this beautiful palette to work within. That anchored us in the campaign.”

The imagery from the video—several old radios, including a boom box; funky headphones with old-school antennae poking skyward; Billy Bob wearing cricket pads and holding a cricket bat—also comes to life on the album packaging.

Below, check out two different versions of the vinyl LP, as well as some images from the CD booklet.

Vinyl LP, version 1

Credit: Interscope Records/Verve Records

Vinyl LP, version 2

Credit: Interscope Records/Verve Records

CD booklet

Credit: Interscope Records/Verve Records

“At one point you see John’s got cricket pads on. Cricket’s the second largest sport in the world. It gave it that global feel,” said Jeffery. “We said very early on in the project, there are no rules. In conventional advertising, you’re always getting pulled back—that’s kind of how the industry works. Everybody weighs in on things. With John, it was almost the opposite. We’d throw out an idea and John would build on it and it would become even more creative and more bombastic and more crazy. That’s the beauty of this iterative process.” 

For Batiste, this melting pot of imagery and influence is the beauty of the larger project—celebrating the universality of music, getting beyond genre labels (Batiste has long been frustrated at being pigeonholed as a jazz artist), embodying acceptance and inclusion in a time of extreme polarization. 

The campaign also includes some traditional advertising, much of which focuses on the very idea that to label music is to diminish it.

Credit: Interscope Records/Verve Records

“We’ve been trained to look at things based on types, to assess things through these narrow corridors of genre,” said Batiste. “It creates a lack of appreciation for creativity that falls outside those lines, or at least a confusion over how to assess it. ... Across the thousands of years of civilization, our music had no name—you didn’t call it R&B, or pop, or jazz, or folk. It was our ritual music, our sacred music, our music when someone is born, our music when someone passes into the next realm. We passed the fiddle around the drum circle. What we’re saying [with the message of “World Music Radio”] is just the truth. It’s counterculture. Radical inclusivity and radical oneness is very punk.”

There is also merch. See some examples here:

Credit: Interscope Records/Verve Records

The future of ‘World Music Radio’

The campaign is open-ended, too. Batiste and Jeffery both envision activations that could bring the fantasy world of Billy Bob Bo Bob into the real world—in ways that range from playful to purpose-driven.

“We’ve now got this radio station, which makes it easy for John to quickly and easily create more content as host,” said Jeffery. “Imagine if we created World Music Radio headquarters at John’s home or in his hotel room, wherever he is on the road. With simple propping—a microphone, some signage, he has the headphones with him at all times—we can keep this campaign going. It gives it legs.”

“We can activate with the song ‘Drink Water’ and bring clean water to communities in the continent of Africa that are struggling with that,” added Batiste. “Billy Bob Bo Bob can be this person who speaks on the radio in communities that still have radio. We can make radios and give them to people. It expands all of the ways we can do good in the world—with this prompt of ‘world music’ and Billy Bob as the ambassador. This is really just the beginning.”

For Jeffery and the Doner/Wolfgang team, the whole project has been a breath of fresh air, allowing the creatives to transcend their own particular “genres” and flex creative muscles of their own—something Jeffery believes is vital to staying engaged.

“If you’re a creative, you grew up loving all sorts of different types of creativity,” he said. “Maybe you drew as a kid, or you wanted to pursue photography, or write books, or sing. But as we get into the industry, you become an art director, or a copywriter, or a designer. And currently the industry isn’t really set up to allow our creators to flex beyond that and just be creative, to enable them to just get the most out of themselves—and the industry.” 

He added: “This was an amazing opportunity to figure out, how do we get the most out of our people, and help evolve the industry and our company to be the most creative it can be? We drew on our advertising background, but at the same time we had art directors doing photography and designers doing animation. We’ve got all these different people doing amazing things outside of their boxes. It’s a ‘yes and’ culture we’ve created, with no rules. John uses the word ‘limitless,’ and that’s really what creativity should be.”