Veronica Maggio is a Swedish artist who is famous for her unique lyrics and storytelling technique. For the song ‘Ayahuasca’, we did something unexpected. We removed the vocals and the lyrics from the track. On Veronicamaggio.se, we uploaded an instrumental version of the new song. However, the vocal track was muted.

The challenge for her fans was to guess the lyrics word by word to add it back in. Her fans needed to identify 97 words out of the 170,000 words in the Swedish language and place them in the exact order. To make it even harder, her fans were just given one guess each. If they completed the challenge the song would instantaneously be released on Spotify. It wasn’t supposed to be easy; we wanted people to really think about which words she is most likely to use, to Google synonyms and to analyse her previous work. The custom site we built for this allowed the vocal track to be added in dynamically with each guess. As soon as a word was discovered and unlocked, the vocals for that part of the track could be heard.

Another important feature was that everyone could see each other’s guesses in real time. This meant that you could learn from other people’s mistakes and this made the activity a fun collaboration.

Together with news magazines, blogs and her own social media accounts, we released clues and riddles that gave out important building blocks of the lyrics. This expanded the campaign beyond a single site and encouraged people of all music tastes to see if they could solve the puzzle. At the end of the campaign, the final word had 838 guesses before a 15-year-old girl from Gottenburgh solved it – “Sufletten” (“convertible top”) – and unlocked the song on Spotify. This triggered a remarketing activity to the 40,000 people who had been active in the campaign, which instantly took the song to the Spotify top 50 in Sweden.