Netflix Marketing
Brave Dog Assignment:
The Netflix team leading the global campaign to launch Wednesday wanted a comprehensive awards strategy as big as their five continents-spanning campaign for this new original series. This team is already time-challenged as they direct all phases of campaign development, strategy, and tactical implementation for overlapping global campaigns, while juggling all of the associated agencies, projects, and international partners. The Wednesday campaign was in its prelaunch phase with the premiere culmination coming in six weeks. Brave Dog was asked to do a comprehensive assessment of Wednesday’s global campaign plans, develop an awards strategy, and guide the team’s development of all required entry materials. And accomplish all of this within eight weeks in order to hit the first major awards competition deadline.
Netflix’s Marketing Challenge:
Entertainment marketing is continually churning. New titles are launched every month, all while managing overlapping campaigns in development from concept through production and prelaunch teasers. Entertainment marketers grapple with inherent disadvantages compared to global consumer brand peers when seeking advertising and creative recognition for global marketing excellence. Global advertising competitions strongly bias towards high concept and expensive original creative shoots, in part because competitions like Cannes are dominated by gigantic global brands with one major message to activate (e.g. Super Bowl campaigns). And because entertainment campaigns by necessity are relatively short lasting – creative is constrained by the functional need to always communicate title, date, talent, and hook line. These limitations of creative format and campaign duration make it harder for entertainment advertising to compete at the elite global level.
As streaming services competition intensifies, it is a higher priority for the Netflix team to demonstrate that the best of their marketing campaigns are world class. Winning recognition in elite global advertising competitions has important external and internal benefits – from partner recruitment and talent relations to retention and resourcing. Netflix wants to win in these elite arenas and prove that it creates best in class efforts.
The Award Challenge:
Netflix creates a team of agency teams for each of their A+ global campaigns. This approach fosters superior creative executions, locally customized across the full spectrum of mediums – leveraging the expertise of boutique A/V, digital, OOH, social, and experiential teams. The Netflix marketing team creates and orchestrates the master strategic plan and ensures that local language efforts remain aligned with the overall strategic messaging of these global campaigns. The awards challenge inherent within this team of teams approach is pulling together a master campaign story. Each agency owns creatives pieces of the whole, but the larger integrated story needs a single storyteller.
Brave Dog’s roles answered two strategic challenges: help develop an overarching point of view and positioning for an integrated campaign awards story; and identify a full range of strong awards opportunities for both integrated campaign and tactical execution recognition awards. This award effort needed to collaborate with Netflix and key creative stakeholders and quickly guide the story development in order to meet the first submission deadlines within six weeks of project kickoff.
The Solution:
Brave Dog strategists did a deep benchmarking of recent integrated campaigns and relevant tactical executions, combining assessment of best in class consumer brands as well as comparable peer projects from entertainment marketers. This benchmarking informed the assessment of the Wednesday campaigns strongest attributes and key points of distinction. A competitive roadmap laid out the best recognition opportunities across tier one and tier 2 competitions and categories. A positioning strategy guided the development of the overall awards story. The Brave Dog team collaborated with the creative team to develop a case study video, campaign summary board, and identify all the supporting creative assets for competition entry.
Pursuing elite advertising recognition often requires a campaign approach that ladders up recognition across several competitions – from earliest entry into US Effies and Andy Awards, through Clios and One Show, then leading to D&AD and Cannes Lions. This campaign approach proved that while Wednesday May Hate Marketing – her team loved the awards won at the Effies, Andys, Clios, One Show, and ultimately at Cannes.
⬇️ VIEW CASE STUDY SUBMISSION ⬇️
PRESENTATION BOARD
