As part of the Fringe Summit event series, Thinkhouse PR hosted an evening with Lauren Wirtzer, Head of Digital Strategy at Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment. Wirtzer handles all digital operations for Beyoncé, and lead the marketing campaign for the launch of last year’s self-titled album, which shocked the music industry and fans with a surprise release.

On the spacious Roof Terrace of Dame Court’s Odessa bar, Wirtzer describes her career, starting out interning at Vibe Magazine while studying at NYU. She was hired for a full-time position, but after only a few years found herself “unceremoniously fired”. She soon took a job as an assistant at Def Jam Records in the 1990s, at a time when the label and hip hop artists in particular were enjoying unprecedented levels of success. After fifteen years, Wirtzer felt as if she had done everything (including “picking up trash and speaking to artists’s angry girlfriends”), and took a detour into gaming, with challenging jobs at EA Games and Zynga. Last summer, she received a call from a friend saying Beyoncé was looking for someone to work on an upcoming project (which was later revealed to be her surprise album). Wirtzer is part of a very close-knit team of twenty, whose responsibilities extend to “more than just management — we focus our time and energy on all things Beyoncé-related”. Parkwood is relatively unique in that it has full creative and video teams in-house, yet, according to Wirzter, “Beyoncé creative directs everything. Everything. Any photo, any piece of content that is posted online has gone through her approval. She is a meticulous perfectionist, as you would expect someone like her to be.”

Wirtzer explains that although she does a lot of social listening on Twitter, she “doesn’t care what anyone’s saying”, and it has no impact on any of Beyoncé’s creative decisions. She usually doesn’t even share her data with Beyoncé, unless it’s something especially cute or funny. “The fans are insane — there are some fans who live, breathe and die anything to do with Beyoncé” and check beyonce.com “fourteen to sixteen times a day.” On social media, Beyoncé is reportedly “more comfortable using Instagram, rather than Twitter. She prefers to communicate in images, as it’s very hard to get things across they way you want in 140 characters”. Instagram, however, allows her to engage with her fans “without much context, and usually even without text” — what Wirtzer calls “inaccessible accessibility”. While Twitter proved difficult for communicating the way Beyoncé wanted, Wirtzer describes Beyoncé’s use of Instagram as “very purposeful”, offering a “portal into her personal daily goings-on and an insight into her own mind”.

Wirtzer recalls the intense pressure that came with the release of the self-titled secret album, which was “an idea entirely conceived by Beyoncé”. Beyoncé wanted to give her fans (who Wirtzer describes as “digital natives”) a “pre-digital”, “multidimensional” experience of her new work: “She wanted to give this body of work to her fans, and allow them to hear all of the content in the way she wanted it to be heard, and in the way she intended it to be experienced.” When asked about the difficulties Wirtzer and her team have creating content to compete with other platforms and devices, Wirtzer shakes her head and says, “The focus is on creating amazing content that will make people stop what they’re doing. And that’s really what happened with the secret album, it was so compelling that it had people drop everything and pay attention.”