The aim was to raise awareness and drive streams for the new single ‘Girls Talk Boys’, which was featured on the Ghostbusters film soundtrack.

The campaign started with the band announcing through their own social channels that they would be releasing a single from the Ghostbusters soundtrack. This was followed up over the subsequent week by a variety of content that included a fake advert offering the band’s service as ghostbusters, videos of the band being slimed and behind-the-scenes pictures from the music video, where the band recreated a budget version of the new Ghostbusters film.

Following the initial announcement, we decided to play on the Ghostbusters tagline “Who you gonna call?” by partnering with US-based Superphone, who enabled fans in the UK and US to freely ring a phone number and hear a pre-recorded message from the band. The message tricked them into thinking the phone call was real and then played an exclusive 30-second snippet of the unheard single. All phone numbers that engaged with the campaign have been recorded for later use to help spread future information to the most engaged fans about upcoming singles, tours and campaign initiatives.

Upon release of the single, we then launched a Spotify ‘share-to-unlock’ microsite, giving fans the ability to unlock the official music video. The aim was to encourage fans to login and share the song to their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Using Spotify as the primary partner meant we could influence the spread of the new single to a new audience and collect information on which fans are Spotify users – the latter of which has since enabled us to more effectively segment email communication by prioritising different retail partners based on what we know fans use.

Sharing the track through our microsite also automatically saved the song to the users’ collection. During the share-to-unlock campaign, we generated further excitement towards the music video by partnering with MTV and providing them with exclusive BTS content from the video shoot to premiere on their Snapchat channel, the results of which were staggering.

After the video release, we continued the theme of media partnering by offering Tumblr an exclusive 36-hour premiere of the BTS footage from the video shoot. As the band has achieved Most Reblogged Tumblr two years in a row, this was the perfect place to showcase more fan-oriented content. In exchange, we secured: a Radar feature; reblogs on the ‘music’ vertical of Tumblr; posts on Tumblr’s social channels; push notifications to engaged 5SOS followers; and gratis advertising inventory.

To round out the entire campaign we also partnered with Musical.ly, where the band set up their account for the first time and posted a highly personal and engaging video using ‘Girls Talk Boys’. The partnership with Musical.ly enabled the video to be featured in prominent real estate across the app, with takeovers occurring on the trending hashtags, main competition banner and popular songs segments of the platform.