Co-creation campaign for Alan Walker’s second album
Sony Music / MER
Alan Walker is one of the world's greatest DJs, regularly performing at the world's biggest festivals such as Coachella, Tomorrowland, and Ultra Music Festival. He has billions of streams and a large social media following of millions of people around the world. Behind the global phenomenon of Alan Walker is the record label Sony Music and his management, MER.
Sony Music / MER
Alan Walker is one of the world's greatest DJs, regularly performing at the world's biggest festivals such as Coachella, Tomorrowland, and Ultra Music Festival. He has billions of streams and a large social media following of millions of people around the world. Behind the global phenomenon of Alan Walker is the record label Sony Music and his management, MER.
Background
Nearly three years after the release of the Different World album, Alan Walker released his second album, World Of Walker. Having previously done a successful collaboration together, Sony Music reached out once more to handle the technology of their launch campaign.
The central idea was to create the official album artwork out of selfies submitted by Alan’s fans as a co-creation campaign. Apart from the logistical challenge, the goal was to reward the fans with a personal digital artifact as an incentive to promote the album on social media.
Our solution
Our work consisted of three parts; a website for selfie submission leading up to the launch, a personalized image to tease the release, and a personal video to promote the release. We performed the project in tight collaboration with the creative team at MER, together with 3D and video production artists at Apparat.
The website was built on scalable cloud technology to handle the launch traffic with thousands of image submissions within a short time span. After each submission, we generated a personalized image for the fan as proof of participation. The image was meant to be shared in Instagram stories and teased the upcoming album release.
The participants received a personalized shareable video on launch day, suitable for Instagram stories. The videos were produced together with Apparat, using a mix of their pre-rendered videos and our cutting-edge React-based video generation technology. Each video consisted of the persons selfie together with a selection of random selfies, all animated in 3D space.
As the selfie submissions were closed just a week before launch, we had to render the thousands of videos in just a few days. To make it in time, we used hundreds of AWS Lambda servers in parallel, performing nearly six months worth of computation.
The results
The co-creation campaign was well-received. Fans from more than one hundred different countries submitted their selfies. The personalized videos were particularly appreciated, with many fans sharing their videos on social media on launch day.