Creative Execution

Will Smith loved our idea of recruiting aussie Will Smiths to take on his BRIGHT promotional duties in his absence. We asked him to record a call out video for us to launch the campaign. As the world’s biggest movie star, his involvement was crucial to achieving mass interest and awareness. Netflix were so enthused we ran the campaign in America too. We edited his video, posting to Netflix Australia social channels asking fans to tag “Will Smiths” they knew in the comments. After the story trended globally, we had Will Smiths from around the world flooding our inbox. We selected successful Aussie Will Smith applicants and trained them into ‘blockbuster’ Will Smiths, releasing the video to Facebook. The training worked, as co-star junkets, media appearances and red-carpet interviews in L.A. followed. We had successfully booked Aussie Will Smiths to promote BRIGHT in more media than we ever expected.

The launch video trended globally, with over 9.9 million PR impressions. Netflix’s social media content drove over 13 million impressions in Australia alone. Ted Sarandos, Netflix Chief Content Officer stated "It's [Bright] one of our most-watched pieces of original content, meaning TV show or film, ever". Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings stated Bright was "a major success and drove a notable lift" in subscribers, their most valuable metric, when reporting the highest quarterly gains in their history. Earned media highlights included Will Smith discussing the campaign on Jimmy Kimmel Live (approximately 2 million viewers plus 850,000 YouTube views). IGN Facebook Live interviewed our Aussie Will Smith alongside Joel Edgerton from the L.A. premiere. BBC Radio 1 (5.72 million weekly listeners) and major Australian Radio stations discussed the campaign live on air. Will Smith flew to Australia, meeting our Aussie Will Smiths on breakfast TV show, Sunrise.

To promote the film, our strategy meant we needed to find REAL Australians named Will Smith to step in for the famous one. Facebook was the perfect platform to launch our search from, as we could target paid media directly to people named Will Smith. People commonly tag friends names in posts they like. We knew the lure of being the Will Smith chosen to stand in for Will Smith would have fans, friends, families tagging away. When Will Smith profiles started appearing in the comments, Facebook allowed us to reply direct to gather their information easily over private message. Twitter was our secondary channel, as we knew an idea can trend in no time at all, which is exactly what happened for us. We also posted the call out video to YouTube so media publishers could embed it on their websites. The hashtag #CallingAllWillSmiths linked all the campaign activity.