The main audience for the series was a narrow group of people who played The Last of Us game, available on the PlayStation platform. Not particularly large in Poland. We also knew that the zombies appearing in the series are not popular characters in local pop culture. The dead people belong to a taboo subject, so Western Halloween has not been popularized in Poland.

However, HBO Max's production is aimed at a mass audience, so our task was to find a way to tell its story in a manner that would interest not only the niche community of geeks and pop culture fans, but also expand the target audience communication and intrigue the series to as many people in Poland as possible.

We had to find a relevant way for the local audience to interest them in the new HBO Max production.

Cans of food, searching for them, or eating whatever is available are symbols of the post-apocalyptic world. In our lives, they are rather associated with culinary boredom and something unsophisticated. That's why we used them to do something unexpected – „The Recipe for Survival”.

We created a campaign where the well-known chef had an unusual challenge. To cook exquisite dishes using products that would be found in a post-apocalyptic world: cans, ration packs, etc.

Knowing that "The Last of Us" is significantly less popular in Poland than in other countries around the world (e.g., three times less popular than in the United States), HBO Max faced the difficult challenge of how to promote its series in a country where so few people are anticipating it.

The goal was to build awareness and convince a broad audience to watch The Last of Us. To achieve this, we had to overcome the barrier associated with the aversion to zombies and apocalypse in Polish pop culture.

The strategy was to generate interest in the post-apocalyptic series without addressing themes that might deter viewers (death, zombies, contagion). To accomplish this, we leveraged culturally relevant and highly important food-related themes present in The Last of Us.

Our 2 Michelin Star Chef Przemysław Klima created three signature dishes that became the cornerstone of our campaign. Canned food, moss, mushrooms, dirt, tableware, countertops, kitchen utensils — the entire campaign setting was created to give the viewer a feeling of a place found after the apocalypse. With limited resources, we recreated the vibe and effects equal to the highest production standards of HBO Max.

The ingredients, preparation method, and final dishes were captured and featured alongside traditional recipes on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and food recipe websites. Additionally, culinary influencers prepared their own surprising "Recipes for Survival" and placed them alongside traditional recipes on their channels to catch people's attention.

Thanks to our campaign we changed the way Poles perceive post-apocalyptic content.

Focusing on the less obvious but important culinary aspect of the The Last of Us series allowed us to reach a new audience and generate significant interest from Polish mainstream viewers, culinary channels, and food related social media profiles. Our celebrity chef collaboration was just on point. People loved it and were continuously recreating our chef's recipes at home by themselves. The campaign got a total of 26 million impressions (in a country of 37 millions), 132 thousand interactions, and client’s record-breaking social media engagement at 7.4%.