With COVID-19 impacting the ability of artists to put on a show and of fans to attend gigs, we wanted to see how we could use AR on Instagram to help Kylie Minogue connect with her fans during the launch of her record-breaking album, DISCO.
Working closely with BMG, Studio Moross and digital studio Simone, we created a ‘Disco Spirit’ avatar for Kylie, which could be accessed via Instagram to perform in fans’ living rooms for one hour only.
With artistic direction from Studio Moross and the avatar produced by Simone, I worked to design and develop the AR experience ready for rollout. Calle Sjoenell developed a fan engagement strategy that connected with key fan groups across facebook, priming them ready for the launch, making sure they didn’t miss the opportunity. My absolute rockstar client partner Vanessa Bakewell helped keep the entire show on the road.
Further leveraging countdown stickers and teaser stories across instagram, the stage was set for the arrival of Kylie’s Disco Spirit.
“Come dance with my Disco Spirit. I loved working on this project and having a sparkling avatar embody the spirit of my album, DISCO, is an absolute thrill; to be the first of its kind on Instagram is very exciting,”
- Kylie
Fan engagement over the rollout was phenomenal. I made it possible to change the scale of the avatar - so you could have her tiny and dancing on your tabletop or massive and as big as a building.
This encouraged fans to play and interact - to make the experience personal and truly their own. While much of the world was locked down, seeing the fans’ excitement during this shared moment in hundreds of posts and stories was truly rewarding, and really helped fans to live the album themes of joy and togetherness.
As we increasingly experiment with remote presence and holoportation towards an AR-glasses future, we want to build up a muscle and learnings around what it means to ‘be’ somewhere, or indeed: to have someone ‘there’ where you. We feel this is a great step in that direction.
Following the avatar release, we re-released the effect with the music and avatar removed, instead styling the fans themselves as the Disco Spirit. This enabled more performative use cases, specifically with instagram Reels.
With this re-released filter, we’ve seen hundreds of fan stories with their own performance content, also leveraging instagram’s music and lyrics stickers to further celeberate and help promote Kylie’s music.
Prior to the entire avatar campaign, we had also helped launch the DISCO album with a special selfie filter for Kylie. This had helped familiarise fans with AR on Kylie’s instagram profile. When the avatar launched, many of them already had a sense of where to go and how to access it.
We’ve seen similar performative fan engagement with this selfie filter as with the repurposed avatar filter. Throughout the entire process we’re really seeing how AR can be a multipurpose tool to help an artist connect with their fans and enable their creative self expression. We’re 100% convinced there is so much more ground to explore here.
“We are very excited to have the opportunity to work on this project with Kylie Minogue, BMG and Studio Moross. With the main goal of enabling and celebrating self-expression, we designed this experience together, to give fans a different type of interaction with Kylie’s visuals and music, bringing fans closer. This project allowed us to explore how established concepts of performance, identity and presence are all converging and being stretched by music and technology.”
-Ricardo Caetano, head of facebook Creative Shop, UK
Press
“It was great to really lean into the digital space for the Disco campaign. We’ve had some memorable online moments”
- Kylie Minogue
“Users were treated to a unique immersive music experience on the platform featuring a holographic Kylie and filter to sample her new album.”
“The record label raised awareness of Kylie Minogue’s new album DISCO during a nationwide lockdown by creating an interactive music experience, which brought the singer into people’s homes through two augmented reality filters.”