Netflix takes disruptive route to promote horror thriller Ghoul

After launching its web series Sacred Games with much hype, Netflix has now shifted focus to its upcoming second Indian original series, ‘Ghoul’. In a kind of disruptive creative stunt, the OTT platform has superimposed the Ghoul ‘symbol’ on the OOH sites where it promoted Sacred Games. As a part of the teaser campaign, Wavemaker ideated the campaign along with Kinetic as the OOH agency behind it and Netflix’s in-house creative team.

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The teaser campaign ran from August 11 to 15, the main campaign was launched on August 16 and the series will be launched on August 24.

The brief given to Wavemaker was to create awareness and intrigue for the horror thriller series Ghoul, claimed to be a first-of-its-kind for India market and for Netflix in India. The campaign had a two-forked aim of re-targeting the Sacred Games audience and to attract the new ones at the same time.

Shekhar Banerjee, Managing Partner, Wavemaker, said, “Ghoul was following the much-acclaimed Sacred Games launch with big Bollywood stars and we had a tall task to build cult for the otherwise considered a niche genre content. Staying true to the Netflix brand, our strategy was about ‘disruptive storytelling’; what you are witnessing is a continuous and connected experience across touchpoints driven by an ideal synergy between media and creative. Cheers to the agile yet rigorous pre-planning phase, we co-created the innovative communications solution versus fitting the ready creatives across media vehicles.”

The five-city OOH plan was spread out in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune and Bangalore, covering 127 sites. A Kinetic official said, “The media approach was staggered. Out of the total sites that were planned for the campaign, 50% were used in the teaser part to build the intrigue. The remaining sites started from August 16 in the reveal phase to build the impact and visibility. Larger-than-life billboards were deployed across markets at main arterial routes, nodal junctions, key connectors, trade areas to build impact and frequency.”

Bus shelters (in Delhi), metro train wrap (in Mumbai), digital media at transit points like airports and metro stations, digital screens inside corporate parks, digital screens at TG centric malls were used to enhance frequency and reach.

There is no print media plan. However, TV forms a considerable amount of the media pie, alongside digital and outdoor.

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