Netflix came to us with a challenge: launch our most expensive (and confusing) series to date in a way that would get the world talking. Meet Altered Carbon, a dystopian science fiction cyberpunk crime drama where a legendary soldier is brought back to life 350 years in the future and is hired to solve a murder by the man who was killed but isn't dead. Still with us? Great - let's keep going.
Knowing that fans of the book would be our biggest advocates, we created unique narrative extensions that begged the audience to ride with us by adopting the persona of the evil corporation Psychasec. Assets promised users that they could transfer their consciousness into an entirely new body. This lead up to Netflix's Psychasec booth at CES, the most buzzed about booth of the conference with many thinking that Psychasec was a real company.
As a hard R sci-fi show, Altered Carbon fans were among the most savvy of internet users discovering every easter-egg hidden in flash frames, layered files, and corners of the web. Our Instagram established the first ever campaign to be driven through IG stories first – with all content premiering on stories and getting posted to the feed 24 hours later. After launch, strategy shifted to speak to fans how they were speaking about the show to encourage engagement and sharing. We threw branding out the window with a series of memes and funny videos that fans loved to share on their timelines. We sparked debate by presenting fans with hypothetical situations, dark posted personality quizzes, and alignment charts from the world of the show.
We raised so many questions about Altered Carbon that fans couldn't help but dig deeper, having it end up being the 2nd most Google searched television show of 2018 in the WORLD. When all was said and done, we amassed 150k followers across social, including 18K followers in our /r/alteredcarbon subreddit while driving 803K engagements resulting in a 398.5M impressions across the internet – numbers worth shedding a sleeve over.
