The Headshot Heard Around The World

The Work

From the start, fans have been central to the campaign.

"The Hives Must Album Now." became a viral meme among the fanbase, flooding all the band's social posts after years without new music. To tease new music, the band shared images of this comment on protest placards, mirroring the world's disarray in their absence, which electrified fans.

Alongside this, Something Something and DreamTeam Music undertook a comprehensive digital housekeeping of their years of content by updating channel bios, YouTube descriptions, and more to ensure that once the doors were open, fans would know where to go. Paving the way for a slew of cryptic horror movie teasers featuring the band in their now-iconic trench coats, the band burst into their new era, announcing a series of intimate launch shows. They capitalized on FOMO by amplifying fan and influencer content from these exclusive shows.

Community management was crucial to unearth and highlight the best online content, ensuring fans felt heard and rewarded using tools like TikTok Duets and Video Comment Replies, which boosted engagement.

This created a borderline sense of hysteria for upcoming shows, with comments flooded with requests for the band to visit their city. Fortunately, they would be hitting the road as special guests of one of the biggest bands on the planet, the Arctic Monkeys… what could go wrong?

Then, with one spin of the microphone, the joke quickly turned on the band as one of Howlin’ Pelle’s iconic on-stage moves led to bloodshed. The moment was shared far and wide by fans, non-fans, the media, meme pages, and beyond.

This shooting star moment gave us the world stage, and now it was our job to throw a lasso on it.

While most would quickly move past a moment like this, we decided to lean in.

Not only surfacing and resharing the fanbase’s meme content around the incident but also feeding it with exclusive imagery, subsequent doctors' records, day-by-day updates, livestream check-ins, and an exclusive 48-hour run of t-shirts.

Show after show, we utilized location tags, hashtags, and meme culture that put the band’s fans themselves at the butt of the joke - harking back to the “Hives Must Album Now.” level of social listening and holding a mirror to the fanbase.

Leveraging Gen-Z trending sounds and absurdist memes within the TikTok culture, the juxtaposition with an older band had shares of the band’s content hitting record highs - this modern-day word-of-mouth saw the band’s view counts soaring with no paid media.

Something Something’s content team rarely left the side of the band. Knowing that lightning most certainly can strike twice, we ensured to capture every morsel of The Hives Experience.

Balancing highly-shareable meme-style and seemingly tongue-in-cheek heavy sales pushes, the band generated millions of views from inviting a fan on stage to play an iconic riff, inciting a mosh pit by simply standing silently on stage, and having a show crashed by a covers band in their own hearse and opting to join them for a tune.

Alongside a continuous attitude of no comment goes unreplied, we turned views into sales, resulting in a number 2 chart position in the UK and number 1 in their home country of Sweden.

We began designing a self-sustaining audience growth strategy.

By providing fans with exclusive content, they generated a flood of user-generated content (UGC), which we shared within our core fanbase on platforms like Reddit, Discord, and Instagram Broadcasts. We then showcased the best UGC and fan reactions on more public channels to reach a wider audience.

Encouraging fans to share content from the band’s socials with their friends helped our impressions skyrocket. We engaged new and peripheral fans by ensuring no comment went unreplied, and resharing high-quality public UGC. The band also interacted directly through regular Instagram Lives and TikTok features like Duet and Stitch.

At the beginning of the year, the band announced their most ambitious tour dates in history. It would see them play their biggest venues in almost two decades, including a 20,000 capacity show in Mexico City and their largest Swedish show in 11 years.

There’s no greater proof of a highly engaged audience than to be able to proudly say this would be their fastest-selling headline tour in 10 years.

In order to create this hysteria, sharing content from the band’s channels alone would not be enough.

We worked hand-in-hand with localized campaign teams to create a series of meme and fan accounts dedicated to The Hives fans in various global territories.

This included not only translating mainstays in The Hives’ lore but also social listening to global online events through the local teams to ensure the pages reflected the culture but through the lens of The Hives.

Being their home territory, things had to go one step further in Sweden. With an ongoing public feud with not-so-fellow Swedes, The Viagra Boys, the bands reignited their “beef” with a series of petulant memes alongside high-production back-and-forth videos that made light of the band’s brands. We implore you to watch these in their entirety.

The band has sold over 100,000 tickets already this year.