The Campaign

When superstar actor Will Smith couldn’t come to promote BRIGHT in Australia, we came up with the idea to find and enlist an army of real aussie “Will Smiths” ready to step in and do it for him. Australia might not have had THE Will Smith... But with such a common name, we knew we’d find some others. The name gave us a platform for setting up funny interviews, junkets and just about any promotional activity we could think of. The plan was to find our REAL Will Smiths, then train them into ‘blockbuster’ Will Smiths ready to face the world’s media - generating engaging social content & PR for Netflix/BRIGHT. So, knowing we had 5 minutes of the famous Will’s time, we requested a small favour - to record a call to arms video for Will Smiths to contact Netflix. Then, after posting it online everything snowballed from there...

Execution

Will Smith is the world’s biggest movie star, so his involvement was crucial to achieving mass interest and awareness. He loved the idea and recorded a call out video for us. 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, with Aussie Will Smiths promoting BRIGHT in more media than we ever expected. We set up co-star junkets and media appearances for our Wills, posting the content online. They opened the Bright world premiere event in Sydney and some even appeared on national TV in Australia and America.

• Tier 1: Media Outputs - coverage depth (quality/quantity), tone and message delivery, purchase intent (survey) • Tier 2: Target Audience Outcomes - measurable changes in awareness, comprehension, perceptions/attitudes/opinions, and target behaviors/actions/responses achieved • Tier 3: Business Outcomes – campaign's measurable effect on sales/revenues/profits, market share, stock valuation, brand equity, reputation scores and other traditional marketing and business metrics The launch video trended as the top ‘Twitter Moment’ globally, contributing to over 9.9 million earned PR impressions as the story spread rapidly across online articles. Netflix’s ‘Calling All Will Smiths’ social media content drove over 13 million impressions in Australia alone. Significant earned media wins followed. Highlights included Will Smith talking about the campaign on Jimmy Kimmel Live to a live national television audience - the YouTube video generated over 850,000 views. IGN live-streamed to YouTube & Facebook from the L.A. premiere, interviewing our Aussie Will Smith alongside Joel Edgerton. The UK’s BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Show (5.72 million weekly listeners) and major Australian Radio stations, Gold1043 and KISSfm discussed the search for Will Smiths live on air. Will Smith also eventually flew to Australia to meet the Aussie Will Smith stand ins live on breakfast TV show, Sunrise. Netflix announced that Bright was the most-viewed Netflix film ever for its first week, in every one of the 190-plus countries it services. Ted Sarandos, Netflix Chief Content Officer stated "Every internal measurement says it's [Bright] one of our most-watched pieces of original content meaning TV show or film that we've ever had". 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. Reed also acknowledged ‘big hits like Bright’ “resulted from a combination of great content and great marketing” when announcing their increased 2018 marketing budget.

The Situation

Our Aussie campaign launched with a bang, trending to reach a global audience instantaneously. This was thanks to a special call out video we’d arranged for Netflix’s social channels featuring the world’s most famous movie star, Will Smith. This video showed Will Smith calling out for other “Will Smiths” to help promote his new movie, Bright. People’s imaginations ran wild. Before long, social conversations reached the mainstream, with headline news articles and international TV & radio stations all discussing the excitement that might follow. Then, once we had identified our army of Will Smiths, the real fun began.

The Strategy

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. Once we saw Will Smith profiles 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 and movie bloggers could easily embed the video to their sites as well.