ROMA, the most personal movie of the award winning director Alfonso Cuarón was about to be released globally on Netflix in december 2018. Everything was going great.

But in Mexico, December is the most complicated time to have communication of a movie; all the media is saturated with Hollywood blockbusters and Christmas movies ads. And it gets even more complicated because the movie has all the characteristics to be tagged as the nobody-want-to-watch-movie by Mexicans: Black and white, 3 hours length, Mexican and without soundtrack.

How do we launch ROMA movie in Mexico with a powerful idea that engage with Mexican audience and earns media coverage instead of buying it?

We decided to create our own media, or better said, we re-created it.

Inspired by Cuarón’s memories, we went on a journey back in time to bring back to life a forgotten icon of Mexican pop-culture: The Roji Guide.

Decades ago, the Roji Guide lived in every household and in every car, (It was the analog google maps of the 70’s), guiding people through streets, cities, state lines, and now, for the first time, through time.

We re-created the Roji Guide from 1970 of the Roma neighborhood in Mexico City. The one the film is based on. Just to let people turn the city in a living exhibition of the movie and their own memory.

“With ROMA I want to honor time and space; in a way the places lead what it was about to happen”

-Alfonso Cuarón

So, we did it too.

For a Mexican audience, the most important link between the characters of the movie and them were the city and memories they share. ROMA represented the childhood of many, their family stories at Mexico suburbs, the sounds of the streets that remain almost the same as they were in the 70’s, the movie theaters they visited but today are something else, the smell of our parents car driving through the city, etc.

So we decided to take them back in time and make them feel that deep emotional link between their own memories and ROMA. Letting the places take them through that journey that no other audience in the world could just to create them the need to watch ROMA.

We took on the original Roji Guide from 1970, digitized the map and spotted 7 real locations featured in the movie.

So not only could people learn about the location, they could actually go to that spot using the coordinates and the map, just like people did in the 70’s.

We gave away this Roji Guides re-creating newsstands we see in the movie with the help of ROMA’s actual designer production staff, and we install the newsstands on the very places spotted in the guide.

The experience was active during the release week of ROMA on Netflix, from december 14th to 21 but people continue using the guide and posting online about their ROMA tour until the 91st Academy Awards ceremony.

Since Netflix doesn’t share data about their platform performance, we just know that with ROMA we had the most outstanding launch of a Mexican movie on Netflix.

The relevance of the experience got $315,000 in earned media.

A trending topic in Mexico City during the release weekend.

More that 2,000 pieces of content posted online by audience that loved the experience.

12 Roji Guides have been sold online until today.

10,000,000 impressions in total.

But the most important thing is that we created joy and spark memories for lots of people that use the Roji Guide to discover a new way to go-through their city at the same time they discover a movie that tells their story in someway.