For the release of Said The Whale’s sixth studio album, Cascadia, Arts & Crafts created a series of assets and fan engagement tools all based on the premise of Discover Cascadia (Cascadia being the name of a proposed new country consisting of parts British Columbia, Washington State, Oregon and California).

We created a microsite at discovercascadia.com which resembled a classic tourism website from a city or province/state. The site was meant to tease out and excite the band’s core fanbase and spur online conversation.

The site linked out to a VOIP-based hotline using a browser and mobile-based service. Fans were encouraged to text and call the hotline which featured previews of the album’s songs as well as other information about the Cascadia bio-region at large and the story behind each of the album’s songs.

The voice-over was done by Canadian radio/TV personality Grant Lawrence. This was accompanied by a playlisting app leveraging Spotify’s public API which promoted not only Said The Whale but other artists from around the Cascadia bio-region.

All aspects of the campaign worked together and fed into each other, creating an immersive multi-platform experience that told the story of the album in an organic way. We also partnered with the band to create an extensive merchandise suite that tied in with the Cascadia theme – including flags, pins and iron-on flag patches.

Our goal was to present the album in a way that was true to the spirit and ethos of the band while super-serving their biggest fans. This resulted in thousands of visits to the microsite, hundreds of voicemails left by fans, hundreds of emails, phone numbers and names collected and deep fan engagement which led to the album debuting at #1 on the Canadian Alternative Albums chart. The band’s lead single, ‘UnAmerican’, also reached top 5 at Canadian Alternative radio.