Crunchyroll, the anime brand bringing fans the ultimate experience around their favorite series, prepared for the launch of the highly-anticipated fall anime Chainsaw Man by creating an engagement campaign to immerse and excite fans to adventure into the Chainsaw Man universe.
The series, based on the widely popular and award-winning manga of the same name, follows the misadventures of Denji, a teenage boy living with a Chainsaw Devil named Pochita. Through a series of events, Denji makes a contract with Pochita and becomes the "Chainsaw Man"--a man with a devil's heart.
Goals for the campaign included:
Drive global tune-in, awareness, and hype for the new animated series
Introduce the main characters of Chainsaw Man
Entice and inspire fans to dive deeper into the Chainsaw Man universe
To excite fans ahead of the Chainsaw Man premiere on Crunchyroll, the team created a variety of fun, engaging campaigns to celebrate the series’ imminent arrival. The team needed to create a campaign that immersed fans into the high-energy, non-stop action of Chainsaw Man, educating new fans about the story and characters, and teasing existing fans with what they could expect from the highly-anticipated series. This campaign also needed to be global in scale, to rally worldwide excitement for the series.
To accomplish these goals, Crunchyroll created the following campaign elements:
Chainsaw Man Emoji Campaign. This #ChainsawMan custom emoji campaign encouraged the anime community to ‘takeover Twitter’ with the icon of Pochita leading up to the launch of the first episode. Fans could not get enough of the show’s adorable Chainsaw Devil.
UGC Prompt. Also as a part of this campaign, Crunchyroll provided fans with a user generated content prompt asking fans to share screenshots of what character they are. giving fans familiar with the series an opportunity to connect with their favorite characters and giving new fans a fun, interactive way to familiarize themselves with the show’s main characters.
Authentic Influencer Collaborations. To hype the launch of Chainsaw Man, Crunchyroll worked with TikTok star Bella Poarch and prominent streamer Valkyrae to create a cosplay video featuring two main characters from the series.
Unexpected fun. On the day of the launch of the emoji campaign, Crunchyroll went back to re-share an old tweet of the lead voice actor who requested an emoji campaign. This was not coordinated with the voice actor in advance -- a purely organic opportunity to delight fans!
Viral interaction with US Consumer Product Safety Commission. Various brands shared tweets expressing their interest in the series, including this government organization. Crunchyroll drew additional awareness of the emoji campaign with a comedic response.
Mural Takeovers. To excite fans in Australia and Brazil, Crunchyroll worked with local artists on graphic murals in downtown Melbourne and Rio de Janiero. This video content was shared across SNS channels.
Crunchyroll Store. Crunchyroll ensured the entire organization could share in the Chainsaw Man excitement, as we encouraged fans of the series to interact with a tweet of a fan-favorite character and temporarily rebranded social handles featuring Pochita.
Paid Social. Crunchyroll wanted to maximize the reach of our campaign, so our paid social team supported global IP-specific Chainsaw Man Twitter pages and select Chainsaw Man content posted on the main Crunchyroll Twitter page.
Localized community engagement. In Latin America, Crunchyroll used simple text tweets with fan-derived colloquial expressions about the series to generate excitement by using an authentic tone. For example, a simple tweet in Spanish with the word “Chainsaw Man” in an Argentine dialect drew interest from the Latin American community and we found similar success with another text-only tweet on the day of premiere, drawing interest the amongst the Brazilian fandom.
Chainsaw Man Emoji Campaign: Ran from October 22 – January 2023 and the five hashtags generated nearly 9M mentions and was 98% positive / neutral sentiment (Pochita got a rating of 100%, of course). We also saw hashtags for the various characters grow in use and positive sentiment as the season continued – a sign of continued excitement and interest as the story progressed and fans got to know the characters more.
UGC Prompt: in English-speaking regions, this roulette GIF tweet garnered more than 1k retweets, nearly 1K quote retweets and more than 12.3k likes.
Authentic Influencer Collaborations. The cosplay videos were a big hit with fans, garnering 8M views across the two videos on influencer channels.
Unexpected fun: The delightful interaction with the voice actor for Denji, the main character, drew more than 17k likes.
Viral interaction with US Consumer Product Safety Commission: This fun exchange drew nearly 5K retweets and more than 45k likes.
Mural Takeover: Cross platform stats for our Brazil mural earned more than 2.3M impressions; 634.7k media views; and 170.9k total engagements.
Paid Social: These efforts drove more than 14M impressions on Twitter in just 10 days leading up to the Chainsaw Man premiere.
Overall, Crunchyroll’s global efforts helped rally worldwide excitement for the launch of Chainsaw Man and helped solidify the series as one of the most popular titles during the fall anime season.
