We built a digital experience to launch a new Jagwar Twin single (‘Happy Face’) where fans could immerse themselves in an upside-down world, inquiring what it really means to be happy in society. With this experience we were able to wrap a deep-rooted universal human concept into a high-design yet simple user experience, anchoring a striking visual identity with facial recognition to create a massive and organic wave of buzz.

Building anticipation 

Without explanation, we dropped social posts telling fans to visit a cryptic splash page featuring seemingly disconnected copy, a countdown and a phone number. Fans who called the number were met with a creepy vocoded manifesto asking them to leave a message: “Are you content or content?” Not only were they creating our next layer of social promotion, but they were signing up to stay looped on the drop.

The Voicemail Loop:

We took the fan-sourced voicemails, ran them through a vocoder, and repurposed them into additional social content to create more fan anticipation, confusion, excitement and action.

Site Launch – Unlocked With A Smile

When the countdown ended, we drove fans back to the site where they were greeted by a bomb going off behind a happy face icon which follows the user’s mouse cursor throughout the screen. To start the experience, fans are asked to look into the camera and put on a happy face. Once happiness is detected through smile recognition, we start the experience. By holding a smile, fans could hear the song before it was available on DSPs (sounds easier than it is) but we built the site to flash “smile more” at them if they started to lose their smile. If a smile was lost, the branding would melt and the music would come to a full stop, ending the experience.

Social

All fans received an animated gif of their experience to share out to social media and drive the next batch of users to discover the site.

Gated merch capsule

In a digital age, we often must ask ourselves if we’re the product. To play into this, we designed a limited-edition merch capsule, backed by a custom e-commerce store, that could only be unlocked by getting through the whole song without losing a smile.