The Umbrella Academy was an unknown Netflix Original, devoid of major star power based on relatively unknown source material.

Our brief was to launch the show in the Philippines to an audience that had little, to zero knowledge of the show and the characters.

The problem was we had didn’t have access to the usual marketing collateral, such as Hollywood celebrities, so we were tasked to come up with an idea that introduced the shows themes, plot and characters without them.

The Umbrella Academy features seven unique siblings with super powers who have to set aside their difference and work together to save the world.

Our Idea was to bring the drama of the Academy into the real world by replicating the characters, their abilities and introducing parts of the plot.

Just as the heroes of The Umbrella Academy needed to work together to save the world, we leveraged seven popular Filipino social media personalities who mirrored the characteristics and qualities of The Umbrella Academy super heroes and had them work together with fans and followers to launch the show.

Our target audience was social savvy 18 to 35-year-old Filipinos, in a very cluttered market. We knew that influencers were an effective channel for driving hype for this audience, but the show’s premise seemed too niche for any particular influencer (and their audience) to be right.

We shifted focus from the show’s potentially confusing genre to the more easily grasped traits of the individual characters in the show. This led us to pair each character to a different appropriate influencer, multiplying the breadth of our appeal by seven and reaching audiences we would otherwise struggle to engage.

We then created an event which brought the diverse influencers together to solve a common challenge, echoing a key theme of the show, and giving us an excuse to inform all influencers’ audiences about the range of characters (and their powers), providing an easy entry to an otherwise intimidatingly complex show.

We built a socially connected activation comprised of seven unique sets in downtown Manila.

Each set contained a series of tasks related to each character in The Umbrella Academy and contained objects and information to introduce the characteristics and powers of said super heroes.

Each space was rigged with a camera to broadcast footage of our local heroes solving the mysteries of The Umbrella Academy through Instagram Live. We also broadcast all the action into a main space that contained other guests and media.

The event was opened to over 100 micro and mid-tier influencers (each held 50000-500000 followers) who were accompanied by fans and media alike. They interacted with our 7 local heroes and assisted with solving the puzzles whilst posting about the show and experience to their combined social following of 3.9 million.

Our main objective of the campaign was to drive total awareness of the show and introduce themes and character traits to a largely unaware audience. Using varied influencers, we were able to target seven unique audiences and amplify this by a wider social media following comprised of our Nano Influencer’s fans.

We had a combined total of 7.9 million total social reach of event attendees, which resulted in three times more social engagement when compared to any other Netflix event-based campaign. We also earned over 150+ online and press articles acknowledging our event as a success which equates to $493k in earned media.