What Was The Rollout For Pretty Hate Machine???

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Here's an excerpt from a 2017 interview w/Steve Gottlieb offering his perspective on how he helped foster NIN:

"I was very proud of the marketing campaign we did for him. It was, in my mind, revolutionary. I built my company having developed an expertise in grassroots marketing that was completely different from the major labels' approach to marketing. In 1989, record labels did not do two-year campaigns for alternative artists. They didn't go three singles deep for an artist who was at 400,000 units. Not back then.

We were in a genre where people had very capped expectations about what was possible and about how much money and effort to put behind something. Our campaign with Nine Inch Nails broke the rules. From the beginning, the commitment was exceptionally high: from doing a pre-release single -- with a video, not waiting until it was a successful single 'til we did the video -- to all the pre-release promotion and hype we did. That whole summer we did late-night TV ads, 15-second spots that were just the video. To our use of getting mixtape of Nine Inch Nails out to every hip clothing store, every fashion store, to models, designers, our whole branding of the Nine Inch Nails logo and making it everywhere, distributing hundreds of thousands of stickers -- those didn't end up on kids' skateboards by accident. That all had to be fostered and cultivated.

I haven't said the key thing in breaking a band: it's in finding and helping a band establish their first fans. The nature of grassroots marketing was to make sure that everyone who hears about the band hears about it from the cool kids. You gotta choose to reach the cool kids first and make them evangelists by super-serving them. That's a very specific kind of marketing concept -- I don't think they have it now, but they didn't have it then -- that we were very sensitive too.

The tours that Nine Inch Nails was on didn't happen by accident. They happened because of my effort knowing the management of the two bands and my campaigning to get those tours. And the label giving him substantial tour support."

This is the first promotion of NIN by TVT in Billboard magazine.