In the autumn of 2018, Grammy award-winning band Imagine Dragons, rolled out their fourth studio album, Origins. With album-related merchandise bundles available on their online store, it was imperative we excite their fans about the available product. To do this, Fame House and Bravado partnered to develop a campaign that would not only generate buzz and increase traffic to the official store, but would feel truly authentic to the band.
Over the years, the band has built up a reputation for hiding codes and/or anagrams within their album art. This method has proven to resonate with their fans and is now anticipated by the die-hards nearly every album cycle.
Knowing this, we devised a digital anagram scavenger hunt within a lookbook hosted on the store. This was achieved by shooting two models wearing Origins era merchandise at a location that felt akin to the vibrant dystopia aesthetic of the Origins album art itself. In post-production, we added elements from the album art to truly bring the lookbook images into that world.
We then used custom development and the platform Thinglink to stage the lookbook photos on a page within the online store. Letters of the anagram are hidden throughout, allowing fans the chance to solve the puzzle and submit their guess with their email address. Any guess unlocks a “hidden product” which is revealed through a welcome email and can then be purchased.
After a predetermined amount of time (this campaign is currently ongoing), Fame House will email those who guessed correctly and grant them access to phase two of the riddle. This level will ask fans to decode the anagram and find the final three answers. Individuals who correctly guess the three answers will then be eligible to be one of the five surprise winners who will receive an autographed vinyl bundle from the band.
With roughly 28k page views and 5.6k submissions, we saw a 20% conversion rate in the first week of the campaign. 17% of these submissions took place before any formal promotion from the band occurred (i.e. inclusion in the album release day email blast), while 71% of first week submissions took place before the band even promoted on their social media channels. It’s clear that this tried and true tactic was able to generate organic buzz amongst Imagine Dragons’ fanbase.
The real win for us though was creating a campaign authentic enough to the band that they felt compelled to directly promote their online store via social media channels. This is something we had not yet been able to do with the band in recent years, and was our ultimate goal.
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