Seek No Shelter

A song you can only hear when it’s raining.

Rain, everyone’s least favourite element. The North Face had a jacket built for it, the Apex Flex GTX, and a brand line that asked people to reconsider: Seek No Shelter.

Instead of an ad about rain, a song you could only hear in it. The North Face, Spotify and the Austin band White Denim released the first weather-triggered track: “No Nee Ta Slode Aln”, from the album Stiff, streamed at seeknoshelter.com only where it was raining right then, by live weather data.

At SXSW, White Denim played it inside a storm. The stage at the Fader Fort became the eye of one: lights, visuals, mist, cold air and the smell of rain.

The whole campaign hung on one condition being true, so we made the condition the product. The site read the weather where you stood and either played the song or told you to wait for rain, which turned a media plan into a forecast. The launch was timed to SXSW week, 13 March 2017, with the live premiere three days later, so the music press and the marketing press wrote about it in the same week. Print, digital and outdoor followed the song, not the other way round.

Spotify called it the first weather-triggered song release, and the press ran with that line. Pitchfork, Newsweek, The Verge, Fast Company, Entertainment Weekly, Thrillist, Ad Age, The Drum, Stereogum, Bustle, The Fader three times over, from the launch to the live set. More than forty publications in twelve countries, from Argentina to Taiwan, and thirty-five of the pieces are still online nine years on.