Sharknado. That's right, it's a tornado made of sharks, so getting to higher ground won't save you, and like most of the cast, you'll probably die. Or if you're lucky, survive, but have your arm chomped off. #AprilLives.
In 2013, the made-for-television comedy disaster film debuted on Syfy Network and although was widely considered a TV ratings bust, Sharknado devoured Twitter, catapulting the film into becoming the first ever social media blockbuster.
For the fourth installment, GLOW was sent a mission - and we chose to accept. The task? We had to take this beast of a franchise and elevate it even further creating an iconic pop culture social experience.
Objectives included ensuring the Sharknado franchise remains in the cultural zeitgeist by building upon social conversation from Sharknado 1, 2, & 3 and driving awareness and tune-in by creating content that referenced pop culture and used cameos as storytelling devices
We dove into the mouth of the beast and chainsawed our way out.
Sharknado is a pop culture phenomenon that should never go dark on social media, especially between premieres. GLOW developed and executed an off-season strategy that had Sharknado take a big bite out of Twitter's most talked about events.
We created a tweet storm of real-time content to push out on Twitter during the Golden Globes, SAG Awards, Super Bowl, and Oscars. Pre-made content was produced based on moments we knew were going to resonate well with fans during each event. We developed impactful and hilarious creative in the moment to accommodate funny tweets.
Sharknado 4 social content included:
On premiere night, the world wide social audience chatter was nothing but 'Nado. GLOW's creative and strategic brainpower developed and executed a strategy that engaged fans and influencers, created best in-class creative and dominated the social conversation.
The results blew all expectations out of the water, literally. With over 2 billion social media impressions, Sharknado 4 did indeed take the world by storm. #Sharknado4 trended at #1 nationally and #2 globally during the night of the premiere.
Our off-season strategy resulted in 450%+ increase in Sharknado 4 conversation on Twitter, when compared to Sharknado 3. The live-tweets of the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, SAG Awards, and Super Bowl garnered 1.1MM organic impressions, and TV insider deemed us "social media geniuses" for the activation.
Furthermore, Sharknado 4 saw a 3.2% growth in social conversation volume, after back to back years of -34.1% and -43.8% decrease in volume experienced from each previous installment.
Our strong content and curated hilarious parodies sucked the audience into the whirlwind of this cult classic, and upheld the franchise's social media blockbuster status.
