The legacy of Bruce Lee carries on in Max Original Series Warrior, based on Lee’s writings. Warrior’s season 3 premiere provided an excellent opportunity to bring back longtime fans, and introduce new ones, while honoring Lee’s 50th anniversary of his passing. We wanted to create buzz and reignite, leverage and build upon the established audience and sustain excitement leading up to the premiere by bringing the Warrior world to fans locally and globally through an innovative campaign that’s at the intersection of technology, culture and entertainment.
With a legacy that transcends the AAPI audience, it was important for us to honor Bruce Lee’s influence across all communities. We partnered with diverse artists and commissioned interactive murals in SF/NY/LA’s Chinatowns, three of the biggest in the US and inspired by Warrior’s show setting. We made sure the locations for the murals were easily accessible by foot traffic.
To elevate diverse storytelling and preserve history, we partnered with the Chinese Historical Society of America to develop an entertaining / educational augmented reality experience with relevant historical information and artifacts from the show.
A QR code embedded in each mural transported users into the world of Warrior through a fully immersive AR experience, where they could explore a 360 spherical map of the Warrior set, historical weapons featured in the show, and a Season 3 preview. We partnered with the Chinese Historical Society of America and The Bruce Lee Foundation to provide information on the historical connections within Warrior and the foundation’s mission. Globally, fans could partake via a link shared through social media.
Our initial idea was to create an immersive AR experience that was triggered when you point your smartphone’s camera over the mural, however, to implement three unique murals to the same AR experience proved difficult to achieve within a 3 week time frame, while the murals were simultaneously being designed, and then painted. It also quickly dawned on us that using the mural artwork as triggers would limit the experience to local fans only that were able to see the murals in real life. Collectively with our partners, we made a last minute breakthrough in the experience design, while pivoting to simplify the trigger to a custom QR code embedded in each mural while also sharing the QR code via social media. This allowed fans locally and globally to experience the immersive AR experience.
To generate buzz and excitement, the murals were revealed at the same local time and same day in each city with Warrior cast and crew and community members in attendance. Content captured during the mural reveals were shared out to fans everywhere via social media and press. Following the mural reveals, we hosted a screening of the Season 3 premiere and amplified the AR experience via items imprinted with our custom QR code.
We also developed an exclusive AR walking tour for fans to discover San Francisco’s Chinatown “Through the Lens of the Blade,” featuring integrated content from the Warrior podcast into an experiential audio-scape that users can listen to while exploring Warrior-themed AR sites.
On social media, we tapped creator Tim Chantarangsu to recap the previous seasons to his 1.5MM+ followers and continued to sustain buzz throughout the season with organic posts giving fans an in-depth behind the scenes look at each mural creation, reveal and AR experience.
Without a single media dollar nor a dedicated show handle on social media, our campaign relied solely on the organic efforts of Max, cast and partner handles to get the word out about the launch of the new season of Warrior.
We drove awareness and excitement for the return of Season 3 of Warrior with the simultaneous unveiling of three larger-than-life Bruce Lee inspired murals in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, which were attended by cast and crew. Compared to the limited number of attendees at each mural reveal, due to logistical constraints, the same day event still generated over 320k+ social engagements, 89k+ social reach, 90k+ social impressions, and 5200+ social conversation mentions.
Our previous seasons recap video with creator Tim Chantarangsu reached over 280K+ fans, refreshing their memory of the storyline before the Season 3 premiere.
Our world of Warrior AR experience successfully reached our super fans locally and globally, with over 2.2K unique users in over 97 countries around the world. AR experience: 86% of users were our key audience demographics of 25-35 year olds; Time spent an average of 20 seconds; 36% engagement rate. And 63% of users accessed the AR experience directly from the QR code.
