Popaganda Music Festival: The Pop Charade Release

Popaganda is a Swedish pop festival, held in Stockholm the last weekend of August. The release of the artist line-up is the festival's chance to stand out on a market cluttered with festivals and events. M&C Saatchi, Stockholm's strategy was to involve fans and music journalists to take an active part in uncovering the line-up. We invited them to a scheduled game show on Instagram: Popaganda's Pop Charades, hosted by Swedish pop star Veronica Maggio who also headlined this years festival.

Followers were told to tune in to Popaganda’s Instagram at a set date and time. Then we released the artists one by one thru 17 video charades. The challenge for the participants was to guess which artist we were looking for. The first one to comment a charade with the correct artist name won tickets to the festival and a new artist name was lit up on the festival poster. For three hours, fans were hooked in front of Popaganda’s Instagram. The line-up quickly spread from Instagram to Sweden’s biggest websites and blogs.

Instead of a traditional press release, we created a real time game show on Instagram, with direct response and interaction between one of Sweden's biggest pop stars and thousands of Popaganda's fans and followers. Pop fans who love to show off their music knowledge and compete with each other. With the Pop Charade Release we created a new type of visual music quiz, forcing them to step out of their pub quiz comfort zone.

The game show kept fans hooked for three full hours and generated over 2 600 comments. The reach on Instagram reach was over 500 000 people. The festival line-up quickly spread from Insta to Sweden's biggest entertainment websites and blogs. Overall earned media reach was over 4 million, which is about 40% of Sweden's entire population.