In its first season, SHOWTIME®’s Yellowjackets broke out as a critical and pop culture darling, transcending genres with its multi-generational audience appeal. It struck deep into the heart of online fandoms, and they carried their love for Yellowjackets between seasons.
As Season 2 neared, SHOWTIME® set out to preserve the unique fan community while broadening the audience. To be successful, we’d have to bring the show to life online and off, swarm pop culture, and reward our most devoted followers with round-the-clock community management and weekly reactive content.
Our goal? Create marketing as buzzworthy as the show itself.
With expectations high, we knew we needed to evolve TV marketing to make season 2 something truly special. It was imperative to bring the show to life online and off, kicked off by a YouTube stunt featuring a not-so-cozy Yule Log, set where a beloved lead character froze to death in season 1. A platform hack drove the curious to discover the show's mysterious Rune.
On the morning of Friday the 13th, we launched a livestream countdown on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, captured on a custom set built to match the show's cabin. Fans offered up “sacrifices” to summon the First Look Teaser. Even talent joined in!
Nothing says the 90’s like Kurt Loder on MTV News - so we created a deepfake of Kurt reporting on the missing Yellowjackets, transporting fans back to 1996. Kurt directed them to a 90s era website to join the search and fall deeper into our in-world campaign.
We brought the show's two distinct timelines together by pairing Florence + the Machine with the ultimate 90s girl power anthem for our trailer, and landed on a killer rendition of “Just a Girl”. Inspired by fan love for the show’s theme song, we enlisted Alanis Morissette for a special surprise cover, supported by a midnight drop of her version of the title sequence and a lyric video on social.
The season 2 campaign reached its peak at the red carpet premiere, where talent, creators, and fans came together for an incredible night in the Wilderness. Weekly episode drops meant that we had to keep audiences engaged for months. The best way to do that? Reward our die-hard fans. We met fans where they lived with exclusive content custom-built for each platform and its community. Our “close friends” list on IG became our Acolytes, our most devout members of the hive. On TikTok, we brought fans into the cabin with fun, intimate, on-set captures that made the cast feel like friends.
As fans reacted to the wild ride, we were all ears, eager to give them exactly what they wanted …like turning an on-screen phone number into a working “answering machine” with in-world messages from our characters. We extended the mysteries of the show into the real world when hints from the next episode arrived in power fans' mailboxes, sending them rushing to be the first to post these cryptic mailers on social.
The marketing for Season 2 made Yellowjackets feel so much bigger than a TV show. It was a darkly humorous, always-on experience with reactive content that kept pace with our insatiable fan base.
The Yellowjackets social campaign gained 125K Instagram video views, 665.9K impressions across all platforms, and profile visits jumped by 36%. It also garnered:
