Sherman’s Showcase entered the scene this year as IFC’s latest “slightly-off” original comedy program. As a show rooted in the history and culture of music variety programming that moves through multiple decades, our creative campaign objective hinged on creating colorful graphics that married throwback nostalgia with fresh, unique and expressly modern motion design.
Our creative assets employed snappy motion and vivid color pairings as the cornerstone of our campaign’s look and feel.
Right out the gate we grabbed users’ attention with a throwback Instagram mosaic that laid out the fictional timeline of Sherman’s Showcase through the ages, hiding teaser clips from each year that the show took place to establish our pop culture cred from the start.
We continued to level up the nostalgia factor through custom homages to VH1’s “pop-up videos”. These videos layered motion graphic facts onto the musical performances seen in Sherman’s Showcase. Fresh copy and funky creative worked together to enhance the joke and extend the fake world of Sherman’s Showcase out into the real world of social media. We all know users struggle to watch more than :30 seconds of any video on social media, but this tactic generated completion rates well above the platform averages, with fans calling out the inside jokes hidden within the videos.
We highlighted Sherman’s most out-of-touch quotes in a series of graphics we dubbed “That Ain’t Right” quote cards, where text populated onto the screen, enhanced with bursts of rainbow colors.
The final piece of our creative strategy was a bit more subtle. Sherman’s Showcase, as a mock variety show, is full of fake product ads and made up music albums. We brought all of these elements to life on social by creating social-first versions of things referenced in the show, such as the “Hip Hop Whodunnit?” board game, Sherman’s “Beat Be Gone” medicine, and the hit album “Now That’s What I Call White People Music.” We used these seamless pieces of creative to further engage our fanbase, who often asked us where they could pick up these ridiculous products and albums.
Sherman’s Showcase was a smash hit on social media. We garnered over 15 million total impressions on our social content, 2 million 10 second views on our videos, and 250k engagements across platforms, setting the bar for future IFC original programming.
Celebs from John Legend to Mary J. Blige engaged with and amplified our creative content. At the end of the day, as long as John Legend is happy, so are we.
