Fullscreen set out to tell the story of Magic Funhouse, an adult show about a kids' show, with a heightened, in-world social campaign intended to ignite a fandom around the the show and its creator, Brandon Rogers.
A few priorities were top of mind when developing the campaign strategy: convert fans to Fullscreen subscribers, drive weekly conversation, engage the community with social content that pushes boundaries, and prompt tune-in at key touchpoints: series launch, each new episode day, and finale day, once the full season was "bingeable."
To kickoff the season premiere, Fullscreen + McBeard partnered with the cast to host an innovative, engaging live activation on Facebook that would give fans the opportunity to interact with the characters, inviting them to be a part of the world that Brandon Rogers created. McBeard concepted a narrative that spoke to the absurd nature of the show, while incentivizing audience participation and real-time viewing.
We promoted the launch event as a live "storytime" with the host of Magic Funhouse, Mr. Marble. We offered fans the opportunity to engage with on-camera talent during the stream by asking them to contribute nouns, verbs, and adjectives in the comment section to help Mr. Marble fill in the blanks of (what would end up being) a very twisted story. When the ad-lib was complete, we panned out to reveal an audience of young children waiting to be read a wildly offensive story. In its entirety, the video stream was just under 15 minutes.
Due to the success of the launch live stream, we went on to do one final Facebook live stunt tied to the season finale and official Season 2 announcement. This time around, the activation was positioned as a "surprise announcement," rather than an interactive engagement play. The video began with 2 minutes of pre-roll where the casted PA held up a sign letting the audience know an announcement was coming soon. Soon after, Mr. Marble entered and provided the audience with a special message: that the full Season 1 of Magic Funhouse was now available for streaming on the Fullscreen app, and that there would be a Season 2, coming soon. When Mr. Marble wrapped his message, he "accidentally" forgot to end the recording. A hilarious "hot mic" interaction with the PA came next, before officially concluding the 5-minute stream.
Fans went wild, and conversation about the highly-anticipated Season 2 immediately caught fire.
Within the first 24 hours of the launch live stream activation, the video organically produced 18,633 total views. The video went on to be viewed over 26k times to date. Fans loved the live activation which was evident, as there was a social conversation spike surrounding the series as soon as the Facebook Live event started. To date, the video has received over 2.2k social endorsements.
As for the finale live stream, which was approached as a stunt tactic with no pre-promotion, the video quickly gained traction post-live activation. To date, the video has been viewed over 11k times and received over 2.6k social endorsements.
Both live streams successfully drove series tune-in at launch and finale, spiked social conversation and engagement, and most importantly, gave fans exclusive content to watch and share.
