Unsolved Mysteries

Client

Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries

Year

2020

Location

New York, New York

Awards

Best Multi-Platform Social Campaign, 2020 DigiDay Awards
Silver: Social Content Campaign, Unsolved Mysteries Netflix Launch, '21 Clio Awards

One of the most enduring true crime documentary series, Unsolved Mysteries ran 15 seasons (1987 – 2002). Legions of fans became obsessed with these unsolved crimes and mysteries, dug into the background facts, and passed along thousands of tips about these cold cases.

This campaign will build on the emotional appeals of the true-crime genre: love for gripping stories, desire for solving along with the show, and satisfying fan thirst to find the next big true crime story.

A Little Background

The true-crime genre has exploded in the past few years. Google searches for True Crime have tripled in the past five years. The true crime genre is growing worldwide. Netflix greenlit a reboot of Unsolved Mysteries, relaunching the series in July 2020 with a focus on attracting a new generation of true crime fans around the world.

Social Brief: Engage and activate twin targets. Reach and engage older fans of prior Unsolved Mysteries, and attract a younger audience of true crime fans – converting them into new fans of Unsolved Mysteries.

Social Media Objectives: Successfully launch Unsolved Mysteries, and drive substantial Unsolved Mysteries social engagement across all Netflix social channels.

The campaign built on the emotional appeals of the true crime genre: love for gripping stories, desire for solving along with the show, and satisfying fan thirst to find the next big true crime story.

The Campaign

This campaign needed to leverage global interest in true crime in order to amplify Unsolved Mysteries conversations and reach new/younger audiences. This organic social effort attracted true crime fans with a three-phase content campaign, tailored by platform, all without any paid media support:

Twitter: Key for social listening and reactive community management.
Facebook: two complementary platforms: the official Show page, and six-episode FB Groups. Show page for overall discovery and fan recruitment. Episode Groups built engagement and community.
Instagram: Initially awakened nostalgia, then shifted to new series engagement.

Every mystery or crime resonates with and activates a different group of super-engaged devotees. So, we created communities of engagers with separate content hubs built for each new Unsolved Mysteries episode. The content/moderation challenge was to respectfully create entertaining content for a serious show, and provide sufficient moderation for these community boards to become self-sustaining fan hubs. Within these groups, managing defamatory comments while allowing personal opinion was key.

Multiple formats of social content were developed, tested, and deployed.

FB Group Page/Reddit sub-thread content included never-before-seen interview footage, not available on Netflix — sparking new discussions.
Reactive content from fans: IG stories solicited fan theories; then top theories were developed/republished.
Sustaining content included compilation videos, GIFs/memes, and new social content series.

Phase One. Relaunch Unsolved Mysteries accounts, gain blue checks, get current fans talking again.

The new content strategy resulted in an explosion of new interest: 242X more Video Views, 329X increase in View Time, and 559x increased Engagements.
Active moderation engaged and alerted fans that a new series is coming.

Phase Two. All social accounts go dark as a Closed Crime Scene for 48 hours.

Roadblock Crime Scene posts include a hidden reveal of the new release date.
Two days later, a trailer dropped. gaining 500K and 313% increase in Unsolved Mysteries mentions within 24 hours.

Phase Three. Sustain and deepen the fan community.

Ongoing community management for each episode across platforms.
Reactive content prompted fan input, which influenced supercut and video compilation subject matter.
Reactive social content series extended conversations/engagement.

The Results

Unsolved Mysteries debuted in the Top 10 on Netflix in July, then quickly rose to and held the #1 slot for an 11-day run on the platform. With the help of social content efforts, Unsolved Mysteries has received more than 4,000 stories for consideration and 4,000 active case tips. These tips even included information about the Alonzo Brooks case, which was reopened by the FBI as a potential hate crime a couple of weeks prior to the show’s release. Weeks after the premiere, the body of Alonzo Brooks was exhumed as part of the ongoing investigation. With that, a recent sighting of alleged killer Xavier Dupont de Ligonnes in Chicago has been reported.

The breakout success of Unsolved Mysteries led to an intensity of fan engagement with these first 6 cases. This drove the need for active moderation to be extended throughout the summer through Volume 2 release (October 19, 2020), three months beyond the initial plans for a four-week flight.

Throughout the campaign, 38 organic cross-posts on FB/TW/IG resulted in:

11.28M Total Mentions

8M Impressions

1.27M Engagements

1.9M Video Views

85K New Organic Followers