In a crowded killer doll marketplace, Chucky is the first and still the greatest. If you don’t believe it, go ahead and ask him.
Chucky the possessed killer doll has been around for 35 years, spanning seven movies and a killer series on USA Network and SYFY. The ultimate draw that’s brought fans back generation over generation and throughout all of Chucky’s incarnations has been the deliciously evil character of Chucky himself, exemplified by his unique voice.
As the new season creeped up like Chucky’s little doll feet, USA Network and SYFY enlisted Legion Creative as a partner to capture Chucky’s voice and bring it to life in social copywriting across text posts on X, Threads, IG feed and stories captions, and Broadcasts.
Marketers like to write lengthy copywriting strategies calling out one platform for “the latest news and updates” and another for “the hub of big beat video content.” But that’s all inside baseball. It’s why Marketers build channels, not why fans follow them.
For fans, it’s simple: they love a story and want to bring it into their lives beyond the episodic release. And there’s no better way to do that than through in-world social copy.
Our first order of business was studying Chucky’s voice across all his 35 years of taunting and terrorizing victims. But that wasn’t enough — we’re not just writing FOR Chucky, we’re writing AS Chucky. That means thinking about both his voice and how he would execute it.
Chucky has small doll hands — his typing wouldn’t be perfect, and he certainly wouldn’t be able to switch the caps lock back and forth. So we arrived at a unique style for Chucky – he writes in all lowercase (an organic connection to Gen Z’s preferred texting style) and abbreviates his copy not to seem cool or casual, but because his hands are built for stabbin, not typin.
But this copy-heavy campaign was not without its challenges. Generations of horror fans grew up with Chucky, and they have a very particular sense of how he talks. Our writers had to stay laser-focused on an authentic Chucky voice. Fortunately, social copywriting also offers a unique opportunity to overcome that challenge with 1-to-1 engagements. Fans got the chance to speak directly to Chucky and have him respond in his unique, subversive serial killer tone.
The copywriting of Chucky’s in-world POV was reliably the best-performing element of the Season 3 campaign. It drove press pickup (Collider) and our first-person episodic live coverage trended on X week over week. We regularly ranked between #1 and #3 in Talkwalker’s SocialGuide series rankings and the sheer number of tweets and hashtag usage consistently grew episode by episode. Beyond Chucky’s owned channels, our crosstalk and support on the network channels were SYFY’s most-engaged posts.
Followers on our IG Broadcast channel grew from 0 - 38K in 4 weeks, and we saw over 7,000 fan posts over the course of the campaign.