Inside Netflix’s viral ‘Wednesday' marketing strategy
Netflix CMO says 80% of a show’s marketing is planned, leaving space for reacting to fans.
Fransebas
Fan engagement, but make it macabre
Lee said that Netflix’s “Wednesday” marketing team started creating work for the series over a year ago, while the production was shooting in Romania (the show is set in Jericho, Vermont). The mantra was “what would Wednesday do,” which inspired a social media presence in the voice of Wednesday Addams.
The “Wednesday” Twitter account, which has over 220,000 followers as of writing, has been a consistent point of fan interaction for the show, a trend evolved from the success of brand mascot accounts to those representing specific characters, such as for Paramount Pictures’ promotion of the revived “Scream” film franchise. The “Wednesday” account allows the macabre schoolgirl to comment on trending pop culture events, including the Emmy Awards, as well as share short videos that the marketing team filmed with star Jenna Ortega.
The “Wednesday” team also tapped the lead cast of the show to create a recruitment video for the show’s fictional Nevermore Academy. Featuring Gwendoline Christie (Principal Weems), Emma Myers (Enid Sinclair), Joy Sunday (Bianca Barclay), Naomi J. Ogawa (Yoko Tanaka), Percy Hynes White (Xavier Thorpe) and Moosa Mostafa (Eugene Ottinger), the video pointed superfans to an enrollment site for the school for outcasts. Select fans were sent acceptance letters via mail with Nevermore apparel.
Since being linked to “Wednesday,” Gaga’s song has taken off in a similar vein to the revival of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” after it was used in “Stranger Things.” “Bloody Mary,” which wasn’t originally a single on Gaga’s album “Born This Way,” entered the Billboard Global Top 200 chart for the first time, exploding 509% in on-demand global streams and over 1100% in sales during the show’s first week on Netflix, according to Billboard. One sped-up remix of “Bloody Mary” is the soundtrack for 2.5 million videos on TikTok.
“We couldn't have predicted that,” said Lee. “We knew the dance would be big, but those early signals obviously help our team to really push momentum towards TikTok…because that's where the fandom is. They’re largely celebrating ‘Wednesday’ on TikTok and it’s not a blanket approach for all of our shows—that’s not the case for some of them.”
A fascinating contrast is “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” which enjoyed a brief stint as Netflix’s No. 2 most-watched English-language show before being surpassed by “Wednesday.” The story of one of America’s most notorious serial killers, starring Evan Peters, also enjoyed virality on TikTok as fans lip-synched to lines from the show in irreverent situations. But “Dahmer” wasn’t a show that Lee and her team could chase with immersive activations and in-character social accounts (for obvious reasons).
“We knew [‘Dahmer’] was going to be really big, but also is a darker subject matter,” said Lee. “‘Wednesday’ is a little more fun, but edgy, and ‘Dahmer’ is definitely deeper and darker. And so, we have to approach things in a more customized way, and particularly with ‘Dahmer,’ in a very sensitive way.”
