The long-form documentary, Island of the Apes, tapped into Motherboard’s endemic audience of millions of science and tech fans by uncovering real-life parallels between the film and an island off the coast of Liberia, rumored to be the real “Monkey Island.”

Next, the program bridged the ten-year gap between the film and its prequel, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), through Before the Dawn: a mini-series consisting of three scripted shorts exploring how a viral pandemic impacted humanity during the decade left untouched. Up-and-coming directors were granted complete creative freedom when conceiving of and helming the shorts, which were then combined to create a cohesive mini-series that lived alongside the long-form doc.

The entirety of the campaign was packaged together and published on Motherboard, along with other entrant owned-and-operated channels. One week prior to the film’s theatrical release, an excess of 5.1M fans viewed the videos across the globe, propelling Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to gross $613.6M internationally and become one of the highest grossing films of 2014.

We launched the campaign first in the US and mirrored the entire program globally in 16 different territories. In each territory, we first launched our series of scripted shorts, Before the Dawn, in the order of which the year happened - Year One, Year Five, Year Ten. This helped set the tone, outline the synopsis of the film and “brief” the target audience whom we were trying to speak too.

Now that we have excited existing fans of the series, it was time to speak to the broader audience who do not hold the momentum from the original film. We knew our audience would react fast to the documentary, right after the the series launch, The Island of the Apes Motherboard Documentary set fire to the internet.

The program was extremely successful because of our movie marking approach. Our audience love and believe in the original content we create. We were able revisit a nostalgic memory only the core audience held and create an entirely new generation of Apes fans. One week before the films theatrical launch, the series set fire to the internet and was viewed online by more than 5.1 million fans worldwide, 19 million social impressions, press articles received 25 Million views and, of the 58 domestic press outlets covering the series, 98% mentioned the movie and 57% mentioned the release date. Overall this program helped gain Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to gross $710,000,000 million worldwide.