Research showed our sci-fi fans demanded attention to detail and carefully crafted world-building. We needed to convince them Altered Carbon would deliver on the promise of the sci-fi genre—to transport them to another place—by bringing this to life in the marketing in a unique way.

We knew we couldn’t rely on the typical two-dimensional poster art or a piece of custom digital content to truly capture their imagination, and we also knew typical sci-fi tropes like flying cars and futuristic gadgetry weren’t enough to differentiate our series from others. So our idea was to literally breathe life into our key art and create three dimensional sculptures in the real world. We replicated the reusable bodies featured in the series in painstaking detail, placed them in bus shelters in West Hollywood, California, and waited for them to be discovered.

We transformed five two-dimensional bus-stop ads on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles into full size, breathing male and female sculptures that passersby could touch and react to as if the bodies were in some kind of stasis, seemingly alive but without consciousness. An internal motor installed in the chest cavity of each body created a realistic continuous breathing effect timed to mimic the slow breaths of deep sleep. A silicone goo mimicked the nutrition gel seen around the unconscious bodies in the series. The sculptures appeared in custom steel housings that replaced the existing ad units, and custom backlit signage was added to the top and bottom of the shelter, resulting in a complete customization of the bus shelter ad unit.

The execution was live from January 29 to February 25 and 2.1MM impressions were booked.

The results were testament to the fact that we had caught the attention of consumers and compelled them to talk about the series in anticipation of the launch:

-The effort culminated in 15MM earned impressions, seven times the volume of the original investment.

-We generated more than 7,000 bus shelter-specific mentions on Twitter.

-Altered Carbon was the most talked about new streaming series the month it launched. (Nielsen Social, February 2018)

-The shelters were featured in multiple newscasts and coverage received 2.6MM video views.

Finally, Altered Carbon was the single most-searched-for TV show in February according to Google Trends, proving we had created significant interest in and credibility for the series.