A new adult animated TV show needed an attention-getting social media series for its Facebook and Instagram feeds. The show’s humor ranged from the bizarre to the completely inappropriate, and the social series needed to embody that tone. We needed to “break the feed” and do something different from the campaigns of similar TV shows, most of whom had used their feeds to post short clips from episodes, funny lines of dialogue, and behind-the-scenes content. Few had created a unique series that chose to “embody” the show without actually showing anything from it. We aimed to make viewers think, “Whatever show this came from, I want to watch that.” Thus, we aimed to entertain, not advertise.

In order to attract viewers to an animated TV show about a terrible police department, we created a Facebook Watch series that utilized a universally recognizable format with sound-off compatibility: transcribed emergency phone calls. Emergency calls to the police are globally known, and sometimes, can be very funny. Staying inside a 60-second limit for cross-platform continuity, we tailored each call to follow a specific structure: Start with a believable premise, and quickly devolve into absurdity. Introduce new information every two to three lines of dialogue. Include at least two punchlines written in less than ten words so that viewers could easily quote them in comments. And make the personalities good-natured, so that listeners would relate to and like the heroes of the content. We covered injuries, drugs, home break-ins, public disturbances, supposed kidnapping, hallucinations, and more--all relatable at first, then obviously ridiculous.

Our viewers were “tricked” into believing many of these were real calls. We paid close attention to the comments sections in order to build off what audiences liked most and what they thought was real. We relied on the commenters to organically spread the word to each other, and capitalized on the comedically heartfelt characters. This connected us to the follower base of a popular comedy channel on Instagram—a demographic mostly outside our show’s demographic. Thus, our target audience expanded far beyond the show’s initial fans. By tagging friends, users seamlessly shared the assets across the platforms, allowing the most viral episodes to accrue millions of views in just a few days. This increased overall traffic to the show’s social pages, growing engagement across the full suite of our campaign’s assets, and attracting millions of potential viewers to the show.

The initial six episodes were posted one every two weeks for three months, including five original storylines and one promotional asset announcing the second season of the show. Two months later, we premiered another four episodes to support the ongoing support for the series, which continued to receive strong viewership. They were posted across three channels for maximum reach, always keeping the same format and scale to maintain authenticity. We never needed to scale up, because the subscriber base did all the magnification for us.

The series became the most viewed Facebook Watch series for our global client, with over half a million subscribers. On Facebook, the videos garnered 132.9 million views, with 11.1 million engagements, and on Instagram, they collected 18.1 million views and 8.3 million engagements. Given that each asset was produced for less than $5,000/episode, the return on investment was incredibly high. For a niche show with a humble projected audience, this total of 150.9M views significantly exceeded our targets, and has opened up multiple collaborations with the network for more social campaigns.