'Upside Down' - Candy Crush Music Season ‘25

Candy Crush's core audience is 35+, female, and loyal, but that loyalty doesn't stretch to anyone younger. Younger players had the game filed away as passive, stale, a bit dated, the game your mum plays. Fixing that meant making the brand more relevant to more players, especially those in Gen Z through Alpha.

Music is the biggest lever for youth attention there is, but pull back the curtain and most of it now runs on algorithms and formulae built around what's already proven to work. Odd, for an industry that only ever produces its best work through experimentation and play.

So we leaned into what Candy Crush actually is; play at its purest. We built the brand's long-term Active Brand Platform around making the world more playful. Applied to music, that gave us one brief: make music more playful. Rather than borrow credibility from music culture, the ambition was to contribute something to it, moving Candy Crush from game brand to culture maker; not just another advertiser buying its way into the conversation.

In our audience’s world of content saturation, we needed to do something that would really get them talking. So we built the world's first fully playable music video. A game engine was layered over live action so viewers could swipe and match to actually move the story forward, using the same match-three mechanic as the game itself. Stop playing, and the characters cheekily nudge you back in. To ground it in real music credibility we recruited Grammy winner Thundercat to cover Diana Ross's "Upside Down". We released it like an artist drop, not an ad campaign: pre-release teases, earworm seeding across platforms, music press treating it as an authentic collaboration rather than a brand slapping exercise. We even created bone-conduction lollipops to let fans literally taste the track.

Rolling Stone covered the launch. 3.5 million people played the video in the first 24 hours. Cale Brown's cover alone pulled 33.5 million views. And the track itself garnered 685,000 streams in the first two weeks, playlisted internationally and even hit the top 10 on Japan's pop chart.