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.

The video includes a snippet of the full length music video for “Gang Gang”, released at the same time:

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: