Cuphead is a popular video game franchise created and published in 2017 that quickly gained a cult following. With the success of the game, known for its difficulty, Netflix saw an opportunity to create an animated series for fans and their children.
Netflix approached my agency, and we spent 4-5 months creating the perfect integrated campaign to support the most impactful release of the show. The show was released in February 2022.
In January 2022, we launched a strictly organic-only campaign, which included a microsite created by our team. The microsite hosted a list of 10 weekly tasks that fans could complete to "release souls from the Devil." The tasks were simple, such as liking a social post or tweeting out using the hashtag # TheCupheadShow, and each week a new set of tasks were released. Fans were motivated to work harder to release souls from the Devil, as he was holding the show hostage and needed to be defeated to release the show on Netflix. The campaign was a success, and the "soul counter" on the website (linked to the number of tasks completed through our website code) reached zero, and the show was released.
The campaign also included a comprehensive social media campaign that I led in strategy and execution. I am particularly proud of the work I did on the tone and voice for the Cuphead channels. We chose Twitter as our primary platform as that is where most of the Cuphead community was based, according to my social listening and research.
Each week during the campaign, we executed a "takeover" of the Twitter profile, where a different character from the video game and show would interact with fans and audiences. For example, during Week 1, we featured the protagonists, Cuphead and Mugman, speaking in their broken English and unique jargon. In Week 2, we had a villain from the game, King Dice, take over and engage the audience in a different way. This brought the characters to life for the fans and allowed them to have intimate, one-on-one conversations with different characters from the franchise. You can read more about the community management efforts in my other portfolio post.
My responsibilities included not only strategizing this plan but also executing it. I was a one-man team, responsible for responses to fan-generated content, community management, creating content using the media provided to us by Netflix and Studio MDHR, and scheduling and posting the content. My final responsibility was to report on the campaign's performance and ensure that we hit and exceeded all our KPIs and benchmarks.
I am pleased to share that the campaign was not only a success in terms of exceeding projected metrics and KPIs, but it was also recognized by FWA with an award.
Key Learnings & Insight:
Twitter remains the primary channel of choice
Social listening efforts suggested that Twitter was the home for all Cuphead-related conversations
Our success metrics and results show that this was the right choice
Recommendation: continue to tweet regularly, constantly engaging the community that has been built
Facebook is a necessary evil
The top performing content were posts that users were directly linked to from the microsite
Very low engagement compared to Instagram and Twitter
Recommendation: Continue to focus all efforts on Twitter and Instagram, with a few sustaining posts on Facebook
A glimpse at the potential of Instagram
Instagram has a variety of content formats(statics, carousels, videos, reels, stories)
We only utilized 1 IG Reel and a few IG Stories, but they all performed very well
Audience grew 5x
Recommendation: Continue to leverage IG Stories and Reels as methods of content delivery
The success of personas
Very well received by the community
Constant chatter and discussion about who would be next
Our # AskCuphead, # AskKingDice and other branded hashtags received thousands of tweets weekly
Results:
Channel Growth
Channel | Start | Finish |
1,000 | 4,000 | |
5,000 | 23,900 | |
17,500 | 36,100 |
Share-of-volume
Hashtag | # of Mentions |
# Cuphead | 157,000 |
# CupheadShow | 66,100 |
# CupheadFanArt | 25,600 |
# TheCupheadShow | 88,600 |
1.6 Billion total Impressions on Twitter
275 Million total Reach on Twitter
690k Mentions on Twitter
272k Unique Authors
500+ Verified Authors
Owned Twitter Metrics
General Social Echo & Sentiment
Top PR + Influencer Mentions
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