A captivating, simple and engaging way of making the most of Instagram as well as taking advantage of free features on the platform. The story fits the demographics perfectly and it was genuinely creative – and all for little financial outlay.
Company
Universal Music Sweden / Creative Labs
Team members involved
Eddie Persson
Ted Criborn
Christina Enestig
Malin Lindvall
Daniel Åberg
Nils Wester Litens
Philip Nyquist
Illustrations by: Hello There
Campaign breakdown
Budget: £10k – £25k
Audience demographic: 40% female / 60% male, age 15-30, global
Overview of campaign
After enslaving the human race, Dr Hush banned all music and brainwashed the population into mindless zombies. You are Avicii and your mission is to infiltrate Dr Hush’s broadcasting station to play the last remaining song in the world to awaken the people.
This is the start of Avicii Begins, an interactive story on Instagram. From here, anything can happen, depending on which choices you make. Do you go down the sewer to avoid detection? Or do you take a shorter but more risky path over the rooftops? What if you find a really big dead mouse? Do you investigate or run like hell?
Making choices is as simple as pressing a tag, but choose wisely to win against the evil, music-hating boss. The campaign was created to promote Avicii’s new album, Stories, and to showcase the wide variety of songs on the record, ranging all the way from hip-hop to techno.
The different styles of songs were matched to specific choices you could make during the story and they were played as the soundtrack in the cinematic video endings. This meant that every time you replayed the story, you could get a different ending with a new song from the album.
The campaign received over 220,000 likes during the first five days and became a hot topic all over the web. An important tool to spread the story was the inclusion of other famous brands and artists, like the dead mouse in sewer; deadmau5 fans quickly saw the resemblance and his tweet about the story meant that we got his fans to try the story as well.
The Epic Split (Of Death) and Brofist (Of Fury) were Easter eggs that quickly became popular choices in the story. The campaign connected 23 Instagram accounts into a story where people could choose their own adventure and experience Avicii’s new album in a unique way. But, most importantly, the campaign helped all 14 new tracks on the album to the top 100 on Spotify.
Results and key learnings
By making a campaign completely native to Instagram, we made it easy for people to participate. It was also vital that the story was fun for people that aren’t Avicii fans. The campaign received over 220,000 likes during the first five days with a marketing budget of less than €1,000.
Links and extra info
http://umg-creativelabs.com/portfolio/avicii-begins/
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