How Travis Scott and the Cactus Jack team launched the first #1 album of the decade
In 2018, Travis Scott released Astroworld and the associated earth-shattering merch campaign. We were all left wondering - how could Travis possibly follow that up?
His response, summed up in a single picture:
Drop 1: Black Friday
The Cactus Jack team launched jackboys.travisscott.com over Black Friday weekend with 24 merch offerings. All merch came with a digital download of the upcoming JACKBOYS “Pack”, powered by Single. Each piece featured a minimal black design with both the “JACKBOYS” and Cactus Jack logos:
Some “Drop 1” highlights:
After Black Friday weekend, the shop was replaced by a “Coming Soon” graphic and an “Enter Email” field. Weeks went by…
Album Art Announcement
The JACKBOYS “Pack” was officially announced via Travis Scott’s twitter on December 24th:
Physical pre-orders then went on sale, revealing the album art:
Album Release / Drop 2
On midnight of the 26th, the album went live on streaming services and a second set of merch was released:
Most notably, an auction for the 1988 BMW E30 M3 rally car was announced. The team gathered email addresses with another “enter email” field:
Visual Components
Along with the album came an 8 minute mini-movie featuring each artist from the “pack”. It briefly follows the narrative of a carjacking and street racing crew.
Drop 3
On December 28th, the team dropped an entirely new set of merch, much of it prominently displaying a cartoon version of the Cactus Jack car:
But just like every drop, this one sold out as quickly as it arrived:
Drop 4
Another collection of merch launched on December 30th, featuring the cartoon images featured in Travis’ tweet a few days earlier:
This drop also featured some more on-theme car racing memorabilia:
One more video announcement:
Drop 5
As we entered the finals day of JACKBOYS’ debut week, momentum continued to build and the 5th set of merch dropped:
IRL Marketing
At this point, Travis shows us some snapshots of real world JACKBOYS advertisements:
Final Drop
On January 2nd, JACKBOYS’ week 1 came to a close. But not before a final push by the Cactus Jack team.
Not only were there a handful of new products launched - Hot Wheels Cactus Jack car, Forgiato custom wheels, etc - but they also brought back every single product that had been on sale throughout the week.
To demonstrate urgency as JACKBOYS week 1 was ending, the team put a countdown on the top of the shop:
Results
The Cactus Jack team’s hard work paid off - and the album went #1 on the Billboard 200:
