This month I want to draw attention to a traditional media outlet using new media to create a win for its brand. The tv network, FX, has always been a bit edgy but I think this was a really smart play for connecting with this program’s target audience.
Atlanta is a new series on FX headlined and created by Troy Barnes, I mean, Childish Gambino, I mean Donald Glover. The target market for this is millennials and younger and you can see this come out in how they target the promotion. I do not have cable but this has been promoted really well all over the internet to my demographic.
The bigger point I want to show here is that they are using free things to drive people to a paid product, which will exist only with a purchased avenue. You can watch it on their app but you have to login with a cable/satellite account. Early reports look promising for Atlanta and FX.
How did they do it?
First, they put out lots of teasers. Short teasers, longer teasers that help get people interested.
Second, they put the first episode online, even straight on Facebook and Youtube, without ads, to get people to see it. What a move! They know that the lifetime value of a viewer is more important than that one episode. I think the traffic on the Facebook post is pretty amazing:
The Atlanta page boasts almost 200k likes but look at the traffic! 34k shares, and it has more like than shares. There is no contest here to generate shares, people like the content/ were excited about the content enough that they shared it. A lot. Additionally look at those 1.4mil views. We know that Facebook views are not the best stat to judge success by but it’s a pretty impressive number. It also has nearly 1 million views on Youtube.
It also did pretty well on the TV ratings near the top of the tv charts for that Tuesday night. But I do not think those include the online stats, which is where it is prone to succeed.
People are going to be motivated to either go and watch it on cable or possibly buy it on iTunes for a few dollars per episode. At the time of writing (Saturday evening) it is number 5 on the iTunes video store
This plan brings in some thought processes like are discussed in the FREE book. They gave this away, to help create secondary sales in other places. We probably won’t ever know the exact details of its success but I think we will know when/if it is renewed for a second season.
But this use of social media is a win.
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