Getting creative with your marketing is a great way to stand out from the crowd and really engage your fans. Muse recently ran a marketing strategy titled The Bank of Muse, based off a previous Foo Fighters campaign, In Rock we Trust. The band printed their own currency, the Muso, and distributed the bills at their live shows with a confetti cannon. From these bills, fans could visit the printed link to unlock content.

Lee Martin created both marketing strategies. He explains the strategy on his blog:

I was approached by Muse in April to help develop an interactive campaign that would exist alongside their massive European summer tour both online and at the shows starting May 22nd at Ricoh Stadium. As it turned out, their team were fans of the In Rock We Trust Foo Fighters FOO bill confetti to online campaign I was recently a part of, so we decided to expand upon the concept so that it could exist over the 3-month lifespan of the entire tour while hopefully staying interesting enough for the fans to keep caring.

On the back of each Muso and printed within the tour program, was a link to the Bank of Muse. Fans visited this URL via their mobile devices at the show (or when they returned home) and were prompted to make their first deposit to the bank in order to contribute to a global financial ticker which would unlock exclusive tour content as certain targets were met. Mobile was very important here, because we actually served the behind-the-scenes instant-grat video of Dom to each new account holder, allowing fans to participate right from the show.

Our content rollout strategy was kept very loose in order to respond to fans’ reactions throughout the tour, rather than get locked into something that might fail. In the end, we released several videos, photo galleries, and downloads. We also put together a mid-tour crowd-sourced video campaign for fans attending the Paris shows. It was really convenient to have the app setup to market this before, during, and after the event.

This marketing strategy effectively connected the online and offline experience for fans. It also got fans to work together to unlock content, creating a stronger community. Instead of unlocking individual content, fans contributed Musos to a global total.

To read more about The Bank of Muse, visit Lee Martin’s blog and check out this article on Hypebot.