THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Special Project

Special Project
From the 10th Annual Shorty Awards

#BackedByAxe

Winner in Emerging Platform

Objectives

To promote season 2 of Showtime's hit series, Billions, and reach a new audience, we ignited a relevant platform that embodied the show's ethos.

Strategy and Execution

Billions revolves around Bobby Axelrod's thriving hedge fund, Axe Capital. In the show, his company backs entrepreneurs, products and big ideas. To bring this entrepreneurial spirit to life, we turned Kickstarter, the popular crowdfunding platform, into a social platform, to spread the word about Billions. We created a profile page for "Axe Capital," the fictional company from the show, then funded real world projects, getting Creators to their funding goals. The Kickstarter platform was chosen because it embodies so many facets of today's culture through crowdfunding, collaboration, participatory audiences, and entrepreneurship, making it a natural space for us to connect people to the show.

Results

By getting them to their funding goals, Creators became evangelists for the brand, making the hashtag #BackedByAxe a social media rallying cry— sharing videos and posts on Kickstarter and their social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc.).

Earned media and press coverage of the campaign drove engagement and achieved a reach of 30 million.

Billions was introduced to a whole new audience, and for the first time ever, a fictional company from a TV show invested in real companies in the real world.

Media

Video for #BackedByAxe

Entrant Company / Organization Name

WP Narrative_, SHOWTIME NETWORKS, Inc.

Link

Entry Credits