Act II: Beyoncé's Guide To Connected Campaign Storytelling

This year's Super Bowl set the record as the most watched telecast ever, with much of the event's coverage focusing on the hard to ignore Taylor Swift effect. While Deadpool 3's record breaking trailer has dominated a lot of Entertainment marketing news, it's worth taking a closer look at how Beyoncé creatively used her Verizon ad appearance as part of a larger, connected campaign story.

If you watched the Grammys, you may have noticed something slightly confusing without context -- Beyoncé was wearing a Louis Vuitton country outfit and Stetson cowboy hat. While core fans had heard whispers that the artist was in the process of making country-leaning music, and knew that in fact she is from Houston, Texas, the unique look was both subversive and intriguing to broad audiences. The internet spent the week between the Grammys and Super Bowl LVIII dissecting and theorizing about Beyoncé's Country Grammys look, agreeing overall that it was an easter egg for "Act II" of her album, Renaissance. As one fan put it, "Beyoncé exits the disco [act i] with a country [act ii] hat on…🤠".

This past Sunday, Beyoncé starred in a Verizon ad anchored in her reputation for breaking the internet, ending with an announcement that she will be dropping new music. Immediately after, and in tandem, world building creative content, visuals, and official visualizer videos rolled out across social platforms that paid off with expanded context around the new Country aesthetic she had been teasing prior. Beyoncé released two songs Sunday following her Super Bowl ad appearance, in addition to providing the official March date announcement for the upcoming album.

As campaigns increasingly require a global mindset, and in some cases are becoming longer, Beyoncé's latest roll out is an answer to the common creative question: how do we tell a connected story across multiple touch points in our campaign?