This second, digitally-oriented campaign will draw customers back to Guitar Center’s most unique asset - its brick and mortar locations - with a mythic, Dungeons & Dragons-style game that builds a pre-existing social media microtrend into a quest for epic shreds.
Guitar Center
The Forbidden Riffs
TikTok Microtrend
This trend plays on the urban legend that Guitar Center has forbidden certain popular guitar riffs from their stores for being overplayed:
Static Ads
Our campaign adopts and amplifies this trend, starting with a series of fantastical static ads:
Forbidden Riffs Webpage
The links in our static assets all drive to a special section of the Guitar Center website that calls our intrepid adventurers to action:
Once on the site, players will be presented with the rules of their quest.
We’ll give our adventurers the opportunity to learn the forbidden riffs on a variety of instruments.
User Generated Content
Whenever someone takes up the quest, posting a video of their own performance of a forbidden riff…
…they will be gifted with a special, A.I.-filtered version of their performance for re-posting:
And a select group of fortunate souls will be still further rewarded with travel and seats of honor at…
The Festival of the Forbidden Riffs
Our campaign culminates in the activation to end all activations: a concert for the ages that unites the originators of the Forbidden Riffs for a one-night-only performance of their masterworks in front of a crowd of newly minted fans and friends of Guitar Center.
