Netflix: The Cuphead Show Launch
CupheadCountdown.com + Social Campaign
Our friends at Netflix came to Heyo Consulting with a unique challenge….Netflix was releasing a new series based on the hit video game Cuphead. Cuphead already had a hardcore following online, making it a juggernaut of the indie-video gaming space. Netflix wanted to create an interactive campaign that drove awareness and buzz while engaging both hardcore & new fans for multiple weeks in the lead up to the show’s launch.
No sweat, right? There were a few more twists:
Netflix specifically said “We don't want to make a shitty marketing version of the Cuphead game, no one will want to play that…. AND we can’t give away any REAL world prizes or do any contests.”
Challenge Accepted!
We worked with Netflix to architect a mobile first experience designed around a multi-touchpoint weekly set of challenges and tasks for the Cuphead community. We paired all of the tasks and challenges around the different social channels that had engaged Cuphead fans; Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Twitch, Tiktok, Youtube, etc.
Additionally, we needed to keep the users coming back. So we aligned every task and challenge with exclusive digital ‘surprises’ that users can unlock every week. The fans flipped out over exclusive gifs, unreleased footage, and secret messages from Cuphead, Mugman, and even the Devil himself!
Roles
Executive Producer, Executive Creative Director, Digital Strategy, Writer, Account Management, Video Editor
Partners
Heyo! Consulting (Strategy, Creative, Account Management)
Thinkingbox (Creative Execution, Design, Development),
AntiSocial Solutions (Social Media & Community Management)
Foxhole QA (QA testing)
Results
The fans LOVED the Cuphead Countdown experience site. We had millions of interactions and unique users within the first few hours of launching and announcing the site.
Site Results
Unique Users - Over 20k unique users on the first day of the site with only organic and WOM driving to the site
Users spent on average over 3 minutes on the site
30% of users came back each week to take on the new set of tasks and unlock new digital surprises.
Twitter Key Results
1.6 billion impressions
275 M reach
690k mentions
272k unique authors
6.8% engagement rate on owned posts
Organic Social Video Results
Each week we had a big ‘unlockable challenge’ that was designed to be nearly as difficult as the Cuphead game. Those unlockables featured digital surprises of unreleased clips from the Cuphead Show.
Each video that was unlocked had nearly 1.2M views EACH
That’s a total of over 5M views across the 4 clips we released
