Calling All Will Smiths - we got superstar actor Will Smith to recruit other (real) “Will Smiths” to promote Bright in Australia.

Will Smith couldn’t come to Australia, so after finding out we had 5 minutes of his time, we requested a small favour - to ask other Will Smiths to stand in and promote Bright for him. We posted a video to Facebook from Will calling on anyone named Will Smith to help out by contacting Netflix.

News of our little Aussie campaign spread further than expected. Instantly Will Smiths from around the world were contacting us for a chance to be Will Smith.

We selected successful applicants and flew them to a secret location where we trained them to become ‘blockbuster Will Smiths’ ready to live up to their name. After completing the training, we dispatched them to promote Bright as Will Smith to the world’s media.

Will Smith is the world’s biggest movie star, so his involvement was crucial to achieving mass interest and awareness. He loved the idea and recorded a call out video for us, asking Aussie Will Smiths to stand in for him.

We edited the video, posting to Netflix Australia social channels asking fans to tag “Will Smiths” they knew in the comments. Community managers monitored incoming messages, engaging in fan banter. Netflix US posted our video. The story trended globally on Twitter and was discussed on major international radio stations and within thousands of online articles.

We selected and flew nine ordinary Will Smiths to a training day to become ‘Blockbuster Will Smiths’, releasing the resulting video on Facebook. The training worked, with our Aussie Will Smiths appearing in more media than ever expected - co-star junkets, red carpet interviews, on breakfast TV... all becoming content to entertain our Netflix fans.

The launch video trended as the top ‘Twitter Moment’ globally, leading to over 9.9 million PR impressions across online articles.

Social campaign content drove over 13 million impressions in Australia alone.

Significant earned media wins followed, including Will Smith’s anecdote from Jimmy Kimmel Live (+850k YouTube views) and IGN’s Facebook Live stream from the L.A. premiere, interviewing our Aussie Will Smith alongside Joel Edgerton (+116,000 views).

Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings stated Bright was "a major success and drove a notable lift" in subscribers, their most valuable metric, when reporting their highest ever quarterly gains.

Reed also acknowledged ‘big hits like Bright’ “resulted from a combination of great content and great marketing” when announcing their increased 2018 marketing budget to $2bn.

Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer stated "Every internal measurement says it's [Bright] one of our most-watched pieces of original content meaning TV show or film that we've ever had".