“Good Omens” is a streaming series based on the book of the same name, penned by the beloved writing duo Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. As the lead digital and social agency, we were tasked with the challenge of developing an all-organic digital marketing campaign for the second season of the series after the show had been on hiatus for over four years.
In a world where there is a plethora of choices when it comes to streaming, it is more challenging than ever to keep the attention of fans from one season to the next. That’s why it’s important to be as strategic and creative as possible, particularly with wholly organic campaigns. Through research and analysis, we identified that our core audience was primarily made up of fantasy-curious Millennials and Gen Zers (A18-34), as well as the LGBTQIA+ community.
Our key goals were to:
We knew that if we could excite and re-engage the existing core fanbase we could quickly turn them into brand advocates and leverage them for additional exposure and reach! Typically, gaining back trust from carryover fans of season one can be done with media support from the cast, writers, and directors, however, this campaign launched in the middle of the writers' strike so utilizing these key players was not an option for us.
These limitations drove our agency back to our research, which showed that the relationship between the lead characters Aziraphale and Crowley was a key campaign driver for season one. Catering to our LGBTQIA+ fans, we seeded the pre-launch campaign with plenty of will-they-won’t-they Aziraphale and Crowley assets to pique their interest. Some agencies might have taken the approach of avoiding any inference of intimacy among the leads as not to ruffle feathers, but based on our strategic insights we decided this direction would be more beneficial than harmful for the campaign. If the majority of our audience were going to “ship” the two lead characters anyway, then we wanted to be the ones to package them up — acting as a key source for the fandom by giving them more of what they wanted!
In order to best invite and delight new prospective audiences we leaned into the mystery of the missing angel — a major plot point specific to season two with strong star power and fan reach. First, we connected with fans at San Diego Comic-Con, inviting them to engage in the mystery new to season two with missing angel posters and a special scavenger hunt. Then, using the friendly face of a new intriguing character, Muriel, we partnered with the text/SMS serving Community app to invite fans to share with us their tips, theories, and excitement. The response was overwhelming! We served fans bespoke and exclusive content and they came back to us with enthusiasm for season two. Finally, we developed assets that invited new fans to join in the fun without needing season one context, such as famous art pieces from history with our characters and comedic out-of-context quotes.
Now there was just one thing left to do: we needed to keep our fans engaged so that we could inspire them to participate as brand advocates. With no paid media support we decided to explore a variety of creative approaches in order to keep fans coming back for more. We teased the episode titles through a demonic, backward-playing record that had to be deciphered which invited engagement. Unique artwork was crafted that gave fans a glimpse into our characters’ thoughts. We created fun parody album covers and special in-world art that revealed more about the new characters. Music playlists were made with hidden messages for fans to unscramble while listening to heavenly lo-fi beats.
These uniquely engaging clever clue-giving and guessing assets were a huge hit with many users sharing the assets in other fandom groups or with friends. Additionally, after listening to our audience, we made a handful of additional assets to appeal to their earthly desires such as out-of-context quotes, clips of favorite moments, and additional fan cams of beloved new characters. With all of these organic strategies in place the social channels experienced impressive amounts of continual growth over the course of the campaign.
Despite the odds and roadblocks along the way, the organic social and digital campaign for season two of “Good Omens” was a huge success! All of the two-week campaign performance metrics provided by Prime Video were met and exceeded by the end of its premiere weekend.
Broken down by platform the campaign earned:
Twitter/X
Tumblr
Heavens—that’s a total of over 95 million organic impressions and over 5.8 million organic engagements!
Additionally, the Community app activation utilized innovative engagement strategies, which not only served the existing fandom but also helped create affinity with new fans who were able to engage with the property in a fun new way. The result was very successful with an unheard-of 99.96% retention rate across the entire campaign, and a click-through rate of 86.89%, exceeding the Community app’s entertainment brand benchmark by over 10%. This demonstrates that the fans took well to our engagement through the mystery strategy and that they loved the bespoke content that we served.
A major key to the campaign’s success can be attributed to our agency's concentrated efforts of leaning into and leveraging the original fandom while inviting new audiences to join in the fun—by doing so strategically we were able to greatly increase our organic digital marketing efforts. Cheers to the team, cheers to the fandom, and cheers to the world!
