After gaining traction for his vibey bilingual bedroom pop for the last few years, Mexican-American artist Cuco was ready to go big with his sophomore album, Fantasy Gateway. With a title like Fantasy Gateway, we weren’t restricted by realism – in fact, the more we ventured outside of it the better it was. Fantasy Gateway merges the vintage with the futuristic, the psychedelic with the comedic, and the uncanny with the deeply human.

While we were unveiling animated characters, AR lenses and a full music video incorporating artificial intelligence imagery for lead single ‘Caution’, we also wanted to really dig into Cuco’s personality to lead the campaign.

TikTok was our main focus. This included having fans pick singles from snippets, pre-save campaigns, giving exclusive previews of artwork, videos, tour dates and audio through the platform. Cuco has a distinct aesthetic and sense of humour, and we wanted each post to bring his fanbase as well as anyone the For You page picked up into his world more. What resulted is a series of posts that may not make the most sense on paper, like buying all the mustard from a bodega, dressing up as a gecko or getting into Back To The Future cosplay and driving a DeLorean around LA for second single ‘Time Machine’, but creating an intriguing and humorous image for himself that demanded more context and intrigue.

We mixed in this more unhinged content with pieces that showed off Cuco’s skills as a vocalist, producer and multi-instrumentalist as well to help create a full picture of exactly who and what Cuco is. Over 400k followers later, we’re happy to report it was a success.

One exciting crossover moment of the campaign was the single rollout for album highlight ‘Sitting In The Corner’, featuring norteño artist Adriel Favela and pop-country superstar Kacey Musgraves. We knew that there would be a major opportunity to bring in a lot of new fans with this song since it was so far-reaching in its genre scope – and its vintage telenovela-style music video was just absurd enough to get people searching.

When they did, they could find a live mariachi performance of the song with Adriel, a hand-drawn animated video and the opportunity to win tour tickets for using the TikTok sound. Even across multiple genres, niches and languages, we were happy to help Cuco bring in so many new followers.