With Jenny Han's beloved, best-selling YA book The Summer I Turned Pretty now a major television series, we sought to bring life to its social campaign and make the series a bonafide hit come 2022.
With built-in audiences of both Jenny and the book, we wanted to first capture this core fanbase and then expand our reach to ensure The Summer I Turned Pretty was the series of the summer.
Working closely with author Jenny Han, we ensured the campaign was authentic to the book and the content was true to character. We were also able to leverage Jenny as a face for the series, providing her insight, inspiration, and behind-the-scenes POV.
We included fans of the book every step of the way. The campaign kicked off with a book club hosted on YouTube where fans were able to ask Jenny questions, and were later surprised with an appearance by Lola Tung (starring as Belly) who also stuck around to answer questions. Fans who purchased the newly re-skinned book with Season 1's teaser art could scan with a special Snapchat lens to preview the first few minutes of episode 1 play directly on the cover. Moving towards our official key art and trailer launch, we added all of our biggest fans on Instagram to a "Close Friends" group, seeding exclusive talent-led content to hint at launches they could expect coming soon. Fans loved this so much, word got out and people who weren't originally added to the group were begging to get in! Closer to premiere, fans and influencers were then invited to secret screenings of episode 1 in partnership with Refinery 29 where they could see the show before anyone else.
We reached out to a broader YA audience. To launch the teaser trailer, we partnered with none other than Taylor Swift, debuting This Love (Taylor's Version) in our creative. Not only did we trend #1 on Twitter with this collaboration, Taylor themed her lyric video to The Summer I Turned Pretty and shared our tease to her Taylor Nation fan pages and newsletter. With a few of Taylor's songs in the show's soundtrack, we kept this partnership going through launch. Speaking of music, we created an official Spotify playlist with the soundtrack of the show and published personal playlists from each of the 4 main cast members at launch. Some of the artists included in the show's soundtrack were seeing so much success, we teamed up with them to further promote the show and their music with clips, TikTok collabs, and more.
We knew we had stars on our hands. Although this was the first big break for most of our talent, we knew they would blow up once the series launched. In anticipation, we produced a custom social shoot, both in and out-of-character, to bank editorial photos, b-roll, EPK, and long-form content. We were able to leverage these assets in a multitude of ways pre- and post-premiere, from character intro videos to videos of talent giving each other superlatives once fans wanted to get to know them.
We anticipated the reaction. At launch, it was clear fans were divided into two camps: #TeamConrad and #TeamJeremiah. We had content ready to feed each side while driving engagement and conversation, so much so that brands like the Empire State Building and Roomba got in on it. Even Lizzo chose a team! We sent her custom merch which she later wore in three separate TikTok videos for additional EMV.
Pre-launch, our teaser release featuring This Love (Taylor's Version) gained over 33 million plays and trended #1 on Twitter. Our Snapchat book scan feature saw 1.25M impressions while the Snapchat AR filter/game saw +5.6M impressions. Content from the custom social shoot garnered over 9M views, 7M impressions, and 6M engagements on Instagram alone, with an additional 5M views on TikTok.
In the two months post launch, The Summer I Turned Pretty official Instagram account gained +1M followers. The main cast gained more than 10M combined followers on their social pages for an increase greater than 1000%. Not only that, artists featured in the show and on the series' official Spotify playlist saw up to a 6000% increase in song sales.
Finally, before the show premiered, the book had its best 4 weeks in sales since summer of 2010 when first published. After series launch weekend,The Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy sold 266K copies (sales reported only from Amazon and Barnes & Noble). Four weeks after the series premiered, the entire trilogy was on Amazon's Top-10 List and book #2 (It's Not Summer Without You) was at #1, proving fans could not get enough. The books landed on the NYT Best Seller List for 19 weeks straight as of end of August 2022.
