Warner Brothers approached us with a problem. They were preparing to release Black Mass, their film about notorious Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger. But they were concerned that audiences would neither realize the true-to-life nature of the film nor appreciate the important historical context of South Boston and its connection to the Irish mob.

To solve this, we created a cross-platform digital campaign that bridged the dramatic depictions of events from the movie with the real-life brutality of Whitey Bulger. As this was our first major branded content execution, we also wanted to make an industry-wide statement to show how branded work can serve to defend and celebrate journalism.

We partnered with Boston-based investigative journalist David Boeri (who has spent his career doggedly pursuing the Whitey case) to produce a multimedia campaign that leveraged the important journalism work done over the years to shine a light on Bulger’s story.

To engage our audience, we’d need to reach them on multiple digital channels. So we designed our campaign to work across our entire ecosystem. This included socially seeded videos and editorial pieces on our Snapchat Discovery channel as well as on our Facebook and Twitter handles. On our site, we developed a mobile-first micro-site called “Notorious Gangster” with both archival material from the newsroom and our branded content.

We also built a custom “Super Ad Zone” that included an interactive map and guided video tour. The project featured original aerial photography of Boston and videos of Boeri leading us through the locations at the heart of Whitey’s history.

The results were over 5 million views on CNN.com and nearly 350,000 social actions on Twitter and Facebook. It also added up to a successful box office weekend for Black Mass, netting over $20 million domestically and $100 million worldwide.