Hulu had a problem: they had Live TV, but nobody knew about it. So they tasked us with creating an influencer campaign to spread the word, but they wanted it to feel “real” and “authentic.”

Knowing that influencer campaigns are typically anything but, we knew the only solution was 100% complete honesty.

Hulu Sellouts is an influencer campaign you can’t call bullshit on. Long story short, we had three NFL stars tell the world that Hulu paid them a lot of money to say “Hulu has live sports.”

Then, we tailored each idea to make it authentically align with the individual athlete. For noted “aspiring cat dude” Todd Gurley, that meant getting him a cat named Mr. Hulu Has Live Sports and turning that cat into an Instagram catfluencer with almost 20,000 followers.

Here’s the thing about influencer marketing: it’s just a bunch of people trying to hide the fact they’re getting paid to sell stuff. It’s faker than fake, and while every influencer does it, every follower sees right through it, and no brand had yet to figure out a solution.

So we thought: why not just be honest? Why not just have our NFL influencers own the fact they’re getting paid a lot of money to say “Hulu has live sports”?

Todd Gurley – and his catfluencer Mr. Hulu Has Live Sports – brought this honesty to life with posts celebrating how much Hulu was paying them to sell out.

We teased this campaign with a selfie video on Todd Gurley’s Instagram, where he let his fans know he had finally gotten a cat, but needed advice. His fans and cat lovers everywhere flooded his post with comments. Shortly thereafter, Todd revealed he had named his cat Mr. Hulu Has Live Sports, and asked everyone to follow his cat.

Meanwhile, Todd’s commercial told the story of Todd’s friend trying to understand how Todd was making cat videos on Instagram with a cat named Mr. Hulu Has Live Sports. “He’s verified?” “Yup, he’s crushin’ it.”

And throughout the campaign, Todd promoted the cat’s posts, which helped spark an organic unpaid partnership with @Nala_cat, Instagram’s most popular cat.

With almost 20,000 followers, the cat’s posts reached over 245,000 Instagram users. Those posts generated over 310,000 earned impressions and a 9.73% engagement rate, shattering Instagram’s average of 2.43% for accounts with between 5k and 20k followers.