Your New Music Crush is Sweet as Candy

To celebrate Candy Crush Music Season (an annual music-themed in-game tournament) I developed an integrated 360 campaign that went where few brands have dared go before - the music charts.

From Kanye, NSYNC, Jay-Z, Charli XCX and Snoop to Aphex Twin and Childish Gambino, musical artists from a multitude of genres have a long history of sampling video game music (and SFX) to create hits that ‘clock’ the charts.

We leaned on the popularity of game sampling while leveraging the brand’s ubiquitous (and delicious) IP to create original music with the likes of Kimbra, Łaszewo and TOKiMONSTA. We dropped the tracks alongside ‘candified’ music videos directed by world-renowned director duo WATTS and original album artwork created by Jiayi Li. The tracks were exclusivity available within the Candy Crush Saga app for 24 hours before launching across Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music and beyond.

Brands using music as a vertical is nothing new, but convincing a brand to hand over their IP and grant artists the freedom to create whatever the want, that is, real music and a real music video (not a jingle or a ad) is entirely novel (and was no easy task) but the music and the cultural response speaks for itself.