RCA is already looking ahead to Jade’s next chapter, in the wake of the major’s big win at the Music Week Awards.
RCA triumphed in the fiercely contested Artist Marketing category, with its campaign for Jade’s debut album That’s Showbiz Baby! coming out on top of a shortlist that also included Biffy Clyro, Dave, Ed Sheeran, Elton John & Brandi Carlile, Hayley Williams, Lily Allen, Lola Young, Olivia Dean, Sam Fender, Tom Grennan and Wolf Alice.
That’s Showbiz Baby! peaked at No.3 and has 69,394 sales to date, according to the Official Charts Company. The album recorded the biggest opening week sales for a debut album in 2025.
Will Stevens, head of marketing at RCA, suggested that the shortlist for the category – which is one of the most competitive every year at the event – showed the strength of the work being done at labels across the business.
“It was such a strong shortlist this year, which is a cool thing because it reflects the music industry in the UK right now,” said Stevens (pictured above with host Harriet Rose). “We’re totally honoured and really excited to win.”
Jade, with Strat winner Jason Iley, on the big night
Activations during the campaign included the release of a visual edition of the album, which premiered on YouTube via a livestream, along with an ‘After Party’ offering that fans could watch via Google Player.
Further partners included Meta, Dazed, Bratz, TikTok and Apple, among others, while the Little Mix star performed memorably under the Angel Of The North and at the BRIT Awards.
Stevens highlighted the breadth of Jade's appeal as a key part of the campaign’s success.
“Jade can be positioned in lots of areas, and that's what's very exciting about her,” he said. “She is not just one type of artist.”
Here, Stevens delves further into the campaign…
As you mentioned, 2025 was a banner year for domestic success. What do you think set Jade’s campaign apart?
“Firstly, I think it's obviously incredibly hard to relaunch an artist that everyone's so familiar with. Jade had an incredible career prior to being solo and that comes with incredible anticipation, but also potential baggage or preconceived opinions about her. So, to launch her as a solo artist and actually get people who maybe weren’t fans of Little Mix or had made up their mind about her already to be incredibly excited by it and be really blown away by these tentpole moments in the campaign felt incredibly exciting. We knew it would be hard, but exciting, and the response seems to have been so unanimously positive, to everything that she's doing as an artist, and everything that we're doing as a team to support her. It's been an amazing couple of years, really. And it has been two years, we started back in 2024. A lot of work has gone into it.”
Can you sum up how you’re feeling looking back on it all?
“I’m really proud. It was definitely a massive effort from everyone, because pop is a big thing, and there's a lot of pressure on everyone to deliver. So, across the board, all the marketing is digital teams, all the central Sony teams, it's been a real team effort to get it going and keep it going. It’s been a really fun project to be a part of, for sure.”
Jade had loads of clear goals and a vision of who she wanted to be as an artist – that meant that we could just run with ideas
Will Stevens, RCA
What drove the marketing campaign?
“It was about mirroring [the music] and broadening the conversation around Jade. She had loads of clear goals and a vision of who she wanted to be as an artist. She took the time to figure out who she was as an artist and we were able to elevate that into a really exciting conversation. Lots of that was about just having fun with it, bringing a bit of joy into pop, being fan-focused, over the top and doing the most at every point. That was the base level in this campaign and it meant that we could just run with ideas. For every single during the campaign, we had five or six great marketing ideas, from digital activations, to real world things. And I think every song was a moment, even a mini campaign in a way, so by the time we got the album, we had this massive moment. Jade wanted that and she drove it, and because of that she was open to all these ideas that we were able to deliver.”
More generally, how would you define the role of marketing in a modern pop campaign?
“It’s to really understand the artist, understand what they want from their campaign, how it feels and looks and the narrative that comes with that. Then it’s about blowing it up and getting it as far as you can in the conversation, get people’s attention and then convert them into fans.”
Looking ahead, what’s next for Jade?
“She's touring a lot, she's doing things like Primavera, but then she's also doing more traditional pop festivals. There’s live stuff this summer and then there's gonna be, obviously, new music at some point. And that will bring another relaunch, so it'll be really exciting…”
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