While the album campaign for alt-J’s latest album ‘The Dream’ allowed for content creation similar to the many other examples on this site, I’d like to highlight a few key digital activations that I project managed. These activations made this campaign a really special one, and are really great examples of digital best practices and cross-platform communication.

Album Track Instagram Accounts

To create a deeper connection between fans and new music, we rolled out a series of Instagram accounts for every track on the album. This allowed us to tell the story of each individual track with a set of visuals for further context. We also utilised key new social features such as instagram collab posts to reach a wider organic audience. This exercise allowed us to collaborate with multiple designers to document their interpretations of the music as well as the band’s.

The Dream Quest

The main digital activation for the album release was an online treasure hunt for fans across all of alt-J’s digital channels. Fans had to solve clues throughout the week (finding hidden QR codes, social comments, false gig listings, jumbled reddit posts) leading up to release while avoiding any ‘dead ends’ that teased the user with meme content. Each day’s puzzle lead to a reward - these included instagram AR filters and packs of GIPHY stickers top keep fans engaged and spread awareness.

On the final day, the first person to solve the puzzle won a secret live stream all to themselves, with the band standing by to play the album when the link had been found. We then gave them a choice - share the link with the wider community or keep it to themselves and watch the band play songs from the album for the first time just for them. Thankfully the link was shared and we had a great community moment of reddit and discord users coming together to enjoy the show at the end of the activation, before diving into the album the following morning.