5SOS5 is 5 Seconds Of Summer’s first record release in partnership with BMG. The album came to life on a trip to Joshua Tree, California – a place that captured the magic of the album and helped to define the essence of the campaign. Fans were able to identify the band as being at their most connected and creative. We wanted to apply the same sentiment online and take fans on a journey into the band’s most accomplished album – tapping into a multitude of digital platforms, tools and content types to create engaging and meaningful initiatives.

Fans were served with a Spotifypowered 5SOS5 song mood generator, a Take My Hand world tour hand-tracking AR filter, hidden passcodes on secret mini-sites to an immersive open-world Joshua Tree arcade game and much more. These digital initiatives allowed us to  drive key moments throughout the campaign, and to engage an incredible fan community that delivered UK #1 and US #2 albums.

Securing incredible partner support throughout: a Twitter Fan Tweets segment, Tumblr Artist Of The Month Spotlight, various Stationhead fan listening parties (that were gatecrashed by the band) and their “one night only” globally livestreamed show at the Royal Albert Hall helped to reinforce the UK as a key territory.

To drive UK pre-orders, we created secret mini-sites only accessible via a QR code on UK band member cassettes. The mini-sites hosted exclusive content for fans to work together online and share the code with the global fan base – setting us up for the next initiative.

We then launched the Joshua Tree open-world video game (passcode required) allowing fans to explore the place where 5SOS5 started. Fans were prompted to find missing lyric pages in order to unlock the studio for unseen content. In this self-referential desert, fans battled 5SOS5 enemies, solved lyric quizzes, heard 8-bit versions of songs from the album, as well as many other hidden references that drove the global fan community into a frenzy online. Once completed, fans could then access the studio, hosting exclusive imagery/video content from the making of 5SOS5, alongside accessing four previous mini-games and the album store.