• by Aaron Baar , December 11, 2012

Music group Lady Antebellum is going back to the roots of the country to promote its latest holiday album, appearing in a frontier-set city building game. 

The popular country act has teamed with Gameloft to appear in the company’s “Oregon Trail: American Settler” game. In the new content, band members will appear as in-game quest givers, in which they challenge gamers to build a brand new concert hall in their frontier cities. Once the city is built, the gamers game exclusive content (including a welcome video and music videos from their new album) in the game. 

“Our work with Lady Antebellum [in] “Oregon Trail: American Settler” provides players with the chance to discover the band’s latest music through an innovative way to interact with the group,” Jessica Lewinstein, North American public relations manager for Gameloft, tells Marketing Daily.

This is the first time Gameloft has incorporated a music act into one of its games, Lewinstein says. As with other partnerships (which have included brands such as Hyundai, Hasbro and Red Bull, and entertainment figures like Paris Hilton), the goal is to ensure the content makes an emotional connection with both fans and those unfamiliar with the brands.

“One of our biggest priorities in establishing these partnerships is in ensuring that the content offered is a good fit for both our partners and the game,” she says. “Successfully integrating contextually relevant content into our games is a must if we wish to create or reinforce a strong emotional connection between the brand and our user base.”

For the group, the game is a way to drive further consumer awareness about the band and its “On This Winter’s Night” album “within a large and fast-growing digital media outlet,” according to a statement from UMG Nashville vice president of digital marketing Dawn Gates. 

Gameloft will be promoting the Lady Antebellum partnership, which is available via a game update, through its Twitter, Facebook and corporate blogs, as well as through Lady Antebellum’s blog, Lewinstein said.