The creative idea was to celebrate the 20th season of South Park on Comedy Central by staying true to the essential humor, crudeness, and history of the franchise while leveraging the power of Viacom and its powerful portfolio of brands. The intent was to be truly cross-platform, which ended up spanning: social (Snapchat lens), digital (Giphy partnership), print (EW ad), outdoor (Times Square screens at 1515 Broadway), experiential (SP 20 Experience & Art Exhibit at Comic-Con and Paley Center), press (NY Times), Audience Science (retargeting existing fans through the Viacom DMP), and (of course) television. Viacom deployed all its (non-kid!) brands to support it: CMT (cmt.com’s history of country stars on South Park), MTV (MTV News coverage), Spike (Anthony Anderson: Lost at Comic-Con), VH1 (Love & Hip-Hop South Park-afied), Nick@Nite (SP Quiz), Logo, TV Land, BET, and International. They all went down to South Park and had themselves a time.

Marketing launched at ComicCon; outside the convention center, CC set up an interactive fan exhibit that generated hundreds of millions of social impressions. Viacom partnered with Giphy on a tool that turned all 19 seasons into 85,000 GIFs; they also created Snapchat filters. CC purchased mobile video billboards that stopped at the Church of Scientology, White House, and the Canadian border. Spike created a cobranded vignette featuring a contestant from Ink Masters tattooing the boys onto a fan. MTV ran a custom spot during the VMAs and a South Park programming marathon. VH1 put South Park on the Facebook and Twitter pages of its top show, Love & Hip Hop. CMT integrated South Park into an episode of Reel Eats, recreating Cartman’s favorite dishes. Viacom took over Shubert Alley, covering the walkway with 200 characters for fans to lay down and snap photos with.

The combination of a six-month Comedy Central marketing and PR campaign and the tremendous Viacom cross-portfolio support led to remarkable success for the franchise. It really, really worked. The Season 20 premiere A18-49 rating (of 2.98) made it South Park’s highest-rated premiere since Season Three, with 3.7 million total viewers on linear, 27% ahead of the prior season premiere. Overall, Season 20 was the highest-rated season since 2013, with LSD ratings +21% vs. Season 19. South Park was the #1 show on ALL TELEVISION Wednesday nights among M12-17, M18-24, and M25-34. Across the season on ALL TELEVISION, it was the #2 show among M18-24 and M18-34 (behind only The Walking Dead). On You Tube, video views of Season 20 were +157% vs. Season 19. On social through the season, there were six million engagements and over 3.1 billion people reached. GIFs were seen an astonishing 2.2 billion times.