To promote its new album, the band Fall out Boy partnered with Gameloft. The video game manufacturer developed a special “story mode” in its popular game Asphalt 8 that featured the band members as characters and their songs as part of the game’s soundtrack.
Objective and Context:
On January 19, Fall Out Boy released MANIA, the band’s seventh studio album. To support the release, the band partnered with Gamloft and appeared as characters in one of its videogames: the car-racing game Asphalt 8, which attracted an audience that shared numerous interests with Fall Out Boy’s audience — interests that included music, entertainment, celebrities, and sports.
The campaign’s KPIs were:
Target Audience:
The campaign had no specific audience or target beyond the audience attracted by Asphalt 8. Each user who played the game during the run of the campaign was presented with a welcome screen that allowed them to play the Fall Out Boy-branded story mode.
Creative Strategy:
The creative strategy was to fully integrate Fall Out Boy into the Asphalt 8 experience by developing a brand new story mode which featured band members as characters in the game. This strategy’s promotional objectives enjoyed the support of co-marketing efforts by Gameloft, Fall Out Boy, and Crush Music.
Overall Campaign Execution:
The branded story mode let the members of the band guide the player through a story full of races, dialogue, and exclusive rewards. Players completed challenges issued by various members of the band, earned their trust, and raced for them as a part of Fall Out Boy's world tour.
In addition, the story mode featured in-game integration and promotion of three songs from the band’s new album, as well as in-game pop-ups promoting the album, the world tour, and the new album’s availability for download and streaming on various platforms.
Mobile Execution:
100 percent of the campaign budget was allocated to mobile. This campaign could only be executed through the in-app/in-game mobile platform. The mobile platform was thus instrumental to achieving the campaign’s goals.
The campaign was received extremely well by the gaming community: the Fall Out Boy update to Asphalt 8 was rated best new update on the Apple App Store in the U.S. and in six other countries. Just as significantly, MANIA debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 on February 3, 2018.
In addition, the campaign:
