When The Parisians, a French Rock band from Paris, released their new EP “Difficult Times”, we were asked to promote it online with a limited budget.

In order to boost both the band’s popularity and the EP’s sale, we decided to mess with your favourite bands. Digitally.To do so, we simply took advantage of an already existing widely used application, the iTunes screensaver, and add a twist.By creating 18 additional unfriendly covers with lines directly addressed to other bands, we hijacked the iTunes screensaver to talk trash to the other artists, turning it into a new media.All you had to do was to log on theparisians.com, download the extra covers for free, put them in your iTunes, and let your screensaver do the rest.It rapidly spread through social media from the fans' newsfeeds, shares, comments on blogs, websites, magazines and obviously screensavers. A lot of screensavers.In the end, we infiltrated the peaceful world of iTunes, which nobody had done before, increased the band’s website and Facebook page traffic, had very good feedback from their existing fans, gained new ones, and more importantly, sold a lot more EPs than first expected.

By creating 18 additional unfriendly covers with lines directly addressed to other bands, we achieved to increase the band’s website traffic and hijacked the iTunes screensaver, turning it into our very own media and there was nothing Apple could do against it.

It rapidly spread through social media from the fans newsfeeds, shares, comments to blogs, websites, magazines and obviously screensavers. A lot of screensavers.In the end, we infiltrated the peaceful world of iTunes, which nobody had done before, had very good feedback from the existing fans, gained new ones, increased both the band’s Facebook page and website traffic (+90% visitors and 25% of all downloaded the covers), and more importantly, sold a lot more EPs than first expected.