Creative Direction
Creative Production
Motion & Video
Digital Marketing
Web Design & Development
5B Artist Management
Ride or Cry
My relationship with Slipknot spans multiple album cycles and two distinct chapters of work. The first was through Ride or Cry, where I served as creative director on digital campaigns tied to the We Are Not Your Kind era, including the Touche Booth ARG. After leaving the agency I was brought on independently by 5B, Slipknot’s management company, to run operations for their internal creative agency during The End, So Far cycle. In that role I led creative direction and web development across multiple projects including full website launches and interactive D2C experiences built across mysterious domain names like youcantkillme.com, where the line between fan discovery and official release was part of the design. Across both chapters the work was always built around the same premise: Slipknot’s fanbase is one of the most engaged in music, and the creative had to be worthy of that.
Slipknot needed to launch “All Out Life” in a way that matched the intensity of their fanbase, not a press rollout, a real event. Working as creative director at Ride or Cry alongside 5B, I built the campaign around a fictional Halloween costume company called Touché Booth. I developed the full brand identity and a functional photo booth web app where fans could try on masks and props that subtly referenced individual band members. We built out fake social accounts across Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram, ran paid media behind the Touche brand to give it real-world legitimacy, and seeded cryptic content over several days leading up to Halloween. Clown himself operated the accounts in character, including inside the r/Slipknot Discord, where he was accidentally banned by a mod who mistook him for a spam bot.
The campaign was convincing enough that the band’s own fans couldn’t tell if it was real. When Slipknot’s official account retweeted Touche Booth on Halloween, the community broke open. Reddit threads mapped the mask-to-member connections, fan theories built in real time, and the ARG fed directly into rare merch drops, so cracking the puzzle meant access to something limited and physical. The D2C moment and the fan experience were the same event. The campaign generated press in NME and beyond before the single officially dropped. “All Out Life” launched Halloween day on Beats 1 as a World Record with Zane Lowe, and the band performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live that night.
Copyright © 2026 Jacob Safari
Creative Producer in Los Angeles