In 2022, Drag singing sensation Queen Of The Universe (from the team behind RuPaul’s Drag Race) came to Paramount+, Australia’s newest streaming platform. In crafting our promotional approach for this title, we were met with a significant challenge. Although awareness for RuPaul’s Drag Race was high in Australia, the program’s large and incredible passionate audience sat in the digital ecosystem of our competitor streaming service, Stan, as the long-running broadcaster of the core RuPaul’s Drag Race program.

Our brief was to use social, digital and the influencer landscape to capture the attention of the existing community, driving them to watch Queen Of The Universe on Paramount+

We created Paramount+s first social media companion show. To do this, we raided the talent stable of our competitor Stan, signing two recent contestants of RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under: Maxi Shield and Coco Jumbo. Leveraging the creative concept of Queen Of The Universe as “The Eurovision of Drag”, we branded Maxi and Coco as our Aussie commentators of Queen Of The Universe, recapping each episode on behalf of Paramount+ in a made-for-social spin-off series that was flighted across both the talent and the brand’s social media channels.

We threw caution to the wind, giving Maxi and Coco the full creative freedom and authority to speak authentically as a superfan of the show. A new episode of our made-for-social series accompanied each of the broadcast episodes as an honest, hilarious and unrestrained recap.

In crafting our target audience, we chased what we deemed to be the lowest hanging fruit, the pre-existing ‘Drag Race’ Australian fanbase (18-35yo).

We analysed global Drag Race fan sentiment from 7 franchises, and found that this audience resonated with entertainment-led video content fronted by prominent Drag Queens rather than traditional promo messaging from broadcaster brands.

This led to our key creative insight - that to speak authentically to this audience as the Paramount+ brand, we needed to create an entertainment-led recap format, fronted by talent the audience already knew and loved. We needed to speak with this audience as a fan, not at them as a brand.

In crafting our distribution approach, we analysed platforms and talent, concluding that partnering with former Australian Drag Race talent would give us a slipstream into organic reach at scale with our target audience across tiktok and Instagram, where they are most active.

We produced a broadcast-quality spin-off show hosted by Maxi Shield and Coco Jumbo, published in a short window following the broadcast of each episode of Queen of The Universe.

The series was flighted across the brand’s Instagram and tiktok channels, with snackable versions flighted across the talent’s Instagram channels in order to drive viewership back to the brand’s social channels.

The series was filmed-for-mobile, with everything from set decoration to editing style built for portrait consumption.

Flighted across the brand’s social channels as well as the talent’s, the series was an instant hit. It generated millions of views, overwhelmingly positive sentiment and even the world’s top RuPaul’s Drag Race Queens flocked to engage with the series, plus Aussie influencers such as Carla From Bankstown, DJ Tigerlily, Tanya Hennessy and Hugh Sheridnan, which allowed our series to spread to audiences at scale.

The social media companion series instantly went viral, driving 8.2 million social impressions, 4.4 million total video views and smashed our engagement KPI by 342%. Of those reached by our campaign, 75% were in our target audience of 18-35. Paramount+’s Instagram became Australia’s fastest growning social media account for a streaming service.

The world’s biggest Drag Queens, as well as Australia’s biggest influencers such as Tanya Hennessy and Carla From Bankstown, were engaged and watching our social media series, further extending our reach and driving audiences to the brand’s social channels.

Queen of the Universe drove considerable business outcomes, rocketing into the Top 10 shows on Paramount+ for first-time viewers, demonstrating that we brought in a brand new audience to the streaming platform. In addition, shortly after, Paramount+ become Australia’s fastest growing streaming service.