The pandemic was a tough time for Netflix to release an apocalypse story about a deadly virus that ravaged the planet and introduced a new class of human - the hybrid. We needed to generate conversation about the series among sci-fi/fantasy enthusiasts and a mainstream audience in spite of the real-world similarities that might have deterred interest. We needed to be brave.

We reached our targets of M18+ sci-fi/fantasy enthusiasts and mainstream 30+ parents of kids 10+ by identifying the topics they found interesting and media sources they used most frequently to create a plan that provided significant reach with the perfect context for both standard creative and unexpected ideas.

We started by taking over our audience’s go-to publications for news and entertainment by putting hybrids on the covers of entertainment magazines Ok!, Star, Life&Style, and InTouch, as well as a cover wrap of the USA Today newspaper. Next, we reignited the joy of adding animal features to selfies through a National Snapchat AR Lens that allowed our audience to create hybrid versions of themselves, in addition to sharing hybrid emojis on Twitter. Finally, as a way to truly bring a hybrid into our world, we created an animatronic hybrid named Oscar who is half human baby, half owl, and captured all kinds of reactions to him in a mesmerizing piece of content that we distributed to our audience on Reddit.

Our brave little hybrid approach worked. We achieved (and surpassed) our goal of igniting conversation across multiple points of the campaign. The hybrid video surpassed 80 million views from fans watching and sharing it across Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. The USA Today cover wrap and magazine covers sparked an enormous amount of conversation and debate across social platforms and in the comments under dozens of headlines. In the end, our campaign results set a new normal for conversation about a series, resulting in a total of 43 headlines, 82K social posts, 108 million earned impressions (14x paid impressions), and drove the series to #1 worldwide in the month of June (Nielsen).