A 3-WEEK CAMPAIGN THAT MADE MUTANTS REAL
Marketing Campaign
HOW DO YOU MAKE SUPERHEROES REAL? LEGITIMIZE THE SEARCH FOR THEM.
With “Mutants Are Among Us,” Armed Mind and Fox Home Entertainment created a plausible embedded campaign littered with rabbitholes and reveals that brought the “mutant problem” into today’s digital consciousness.
With superheroes battling on screens big and small all year long, the Home Entertainment release of X-Men: Days of Future Past found itself facing two key challenges:
- 1) Reactivate a dormant core audience with compelling narrative
- 2) Broaden the franchise base to a new superhero-agnostic audience
The solution? A 3-week digital content campaign that made mutants real, and brought home hardware in the process.
Client Fox Home Entertainment
Project X-Men: Days of Future Past Viral Marketing Campaign
What We Did
- Digital Strategy
- Marketing Campaign
- Video Content
- Transmedia
- Social Content
- Websites
- PR
QUICKSILVER'S SOCIAL PROFILE
Parallel to the viral arc was Armed Mind’s social video profile for Peter Maximoff – better known as Quicksilver.
IN JUST :36 SECONDS, A STAR IS BORN
The popular teen mutant from the film boasts the ability to move at super speeds, which allowed for six innovative “high-speed” videos on Instagram and Vine, as if shot on the mutant’s mobile phone (we used green screens and some fancy slow-mo cameras).
STAGE 1: TANDEM INITIATIVE
With a mission of fostering “mutant genome awareness,” the digital content campaign began with the launch of Tandem Initiative, a fake genetic-research think tank that announced a bona fide nationwide sweepstakes calling for mutants in hiding to emerge and show off their superpowers under the #WeAreGifted hashtag.
STAGE 2: USER GENERATED ENTRIES
Eager for the DNA-sequencing grand prize, user-generated content streamed in from “gifted” humans showing off their “abilities.”
STAGE 3: M-UNDERGROUND
An anti-truth organization called M-Underground quietly went live, suggesting Tandem Initiative isn’t who they say they are.
STAGE 4: VIDEO CODEX
M-Underground hacked Tandem’s servers, releasing a “Video Codex” of unexplainable natural phenomena, including Tandem’s research interviews with real biologists and an actual UCLA evolutionary geneticist.
STAGE 5: KENNEDY CURSE
M-Underground released declassified documents on the “Kennedy Curse” – blueprints, medicine vials, hospital forms and telegrams that confirm Ted Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and JFK Jr. secretly shared a mutant genome.
STAGE 6: SOCCER PHENOM
An unaired Bolivian soccer program filmed entirely in Spanish confirmed Tandem’s discovery of a gifted soccer phenom from Bolivia – as well as his subsequent disappearance and a plea from his mother to return him home. M-Underground found his original soccer scouting forms on the Tandem Initiative intranet.
STAGE 7: MUTANT AUTOPSIES
M-Underground found evidence of Tandem’s lethal experiments on mutants, and released it widely. It was discovered that previous years’ winners of the #WeAreGifted sweepstakes were killed.
STAGE 8: AUDIO LEAK
An audio leak was published confirming interviewees from the “Video Codex” were coerced into speaking negatively about mutants. The in-film corporation Trask Industries was tied directly to Tandem Initiative.
STAGE 9: HACKED
Tandem Initiative’s website was hacked and defaced by M-Underground.
THE MOST SUCCESSFUL DIGITAL VIRAL CAMPAIGN IN FOX HOME ENTERTAINMENT HISTORY
With the core attracting superhero-agnostic and casual fans throughout all 3 weeks of the campaign, “Mutants Are Among Us” reached tentpole engagement across all metrics to become the most successful digital content viral campaign in Fox Home Entertainment history.
Results
- 140 Million In PR Reach
- 12 Million In Social Reach
- 2 Million Clicks
- 200 Thousand Likes
- 300 Thousand Video Views
Total Reach:
155,000,000
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