Don't just listen — experience it. Three campaigns built around the crowd cultures that make The Weeknd's world turn.
I developed three audience-led campaign concepts around The Weeknd’s After Hours, connecting fan culture with physical activations.
Sell The Weeknd's world by selling the crowd cultures inside it — not just the music.
A multi-campaign advertising study showing conceptual range and audience-first art direction.
Fans do more than listen: they debate favourite tracks, recognize the red-suit imagery, and interpret the album’s changing character. I used those behaviours to propose three ways into the world of After Hours.
The 2022 study pairs a fan-voted edition, a Toronto exhibition concept, and a billboard voting prompt. Each connects a different fan behaviour to a physical or social touchpoint. These are proposals, not launched campaigns.
"Take off my disguise. I'm living someone else's life."
— The Weeknd, Alone Again (After Hours, 2020)Three distinct ideologies run through After Hours, each informing a separate campaign direction. Together, they map the full emotional and cultural terrain of the album.
The self-realization of his toxicity is at the center helm. The album takes on a return to form — from a voice full of scarring emotion to an award-winning force of nature.
A spiritual successor to the places he explored before. After Hours takes in the sounds of his early mixtapes while pushing into new territory of self-aware toxicity.
References to losing his religion, the pain, the praying, and the overall death — combined with his vision of the villain and the self-hatred into a compelling narrative.
This campaign turns the listening habits and opinions surrounding After Hours into a shared fan ritual. The goal is to build a community around the critiques, responses, and personal moments listeners attach to individual tracks.
The proposed polls on Twitter and Instagram would invite fans to choose the songs they played and replayed most. At the end of the album's first month, the three most-voted tracks would receive the "golden treatment" in a fan-selected repackaged edition.
An exhibition-style brand activation brings the world of After Hours into physical space, giving the album's visual narrative a form audiences can enter rather than only hear or watch.
Proposed for the album's first month at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, the experience would display the era's red suit, gloves, and sunglasses as narrative artefacts. The concept also proposes handling selected props and trying on clothing, connecting the exhibition to merchandise without reducing it to a retail display.
The proposed out-of-home campaign places billboards in high-traffic areas across Toronto, led by Yonge-Dundas Square. Each execution asks one direct question: after hearing the album, is this a changed man, or someone falling further into its darker messages?
A corner QR code is intended to open a simple yes-or-no vote on whether the album revealed a previously unseen side of the artist. Launching after the first month of release, the format can return alongside future tours as an evolving public response to the character.
This project reinforced how brand identity is determined through symbols and differences in the marketplace — the sum of various attributes that define the brand, distinguish it with features, and make it recognizable (Pareek, 2015). The Weeknd's After Hours is more than an album; it is an ideology made visible.
Tying it all together, After Hours was the lovechild at his starting line eleven years ago — the days of melancholy with the heightened energy Tesfaye brings today. Marketing toward his audience requires forming a human relationship while offering value to consumers and music as an entirety. The empty pleasure given upon sharing the emotions has built a sense of trust between the crowd and the artist. Infused is the deconstruction and establishment of this Tesfaye that will not be forgotten.