To promote the new concept album for the rock band, Twenty Øne Piløts, Spotify worked closely with the band to create an interactive, otherworldly experience for fans that brings to life the band’s dark, fictitious world known as Trench.

Twenty Øne Piløts’ latest concept album, Trench, centers around a fictitious world wherein nine bishops keep its population suppressed in a dark, dystopian city known as Dema. A contrarian organization, known as the Banditøs, have banded together to escape the bishops’ suppression in an effort to find freedom within Trench.

The idea was to work with the band to create an interactive 3D music video for their song “Banditø,” that transports fans into the world of Trench. The experience allowed fans to escape Dema, decipher the meanings behind hidden symbols and ultimately join the Banditø movement.

Our close partnership with the band was a key element in the experience’s success. This allowed for direct access to the band’s creative director to ensure we could create a world that both the band and fans would deem a genuine extension of the album’s concept. We then created an interactive experience that fully embodies the odyssey of journeying from Dema to Trench.

The BANDITØ interactive experience was a four-month process, consisting of us working closely with the band and their creative director. The experience’s main focus is the journey from Dema to Trench. We wanted fans to enter an experience that fully embodies this odyssey of traveling through a world built out of moody environments, cryptic graphics and hidden messages.

We created a storyboard to define the timeline and mood of the five chapters to build, based off a few scenes from the band’s previous three music videos. Recreating the scenes from the music videos was very important, giving familiarity to the band’s dedicated fanbase. Each chapter connects to a section in the “Banditø” song structure, symbolizing the journey from conforming to being free.

Throughout the experience, we played with desaturating colors, mixing bright yellow with duotone details and adding in highly-stylized floral prints based off the band’s branding. As an additional layer of content and interaction, short image sequences from the music videos were blended in, creating “flashbacks” that were triggered by clicking or tapping the scene. There were also a series of “portals” that were connected to similar open landscapes that fans could explore.

To satisfy the curiosity of the band’s dedicated fanbase, five hidden symbols were scattered throughout the experience. Upon finding each symbol, an esoteric document would appear, explaining its meaning. At the end of the experience, fans could generate a Banditø badge to share on social and were driven to the platform to stream the full album.

The BANDITØ interactive experience proved to be an instant hit, bringing in over 500,000 unique visitors in the first week, averaging four minutes each session. Over 60,000 fans generated a Banditø badge and shared them across social. In addition to its 16 million overall impressions, it was also the most efficient Snapchat ad campaign for Spotify ever, getting users to dwell on the ad for an average length of 37s, much higher than the platform’s average.