Social Media Campaign Review: AXN India Allows Fans to Build their Own Supernatural Fantasy Plotline

At its core, social media is all about giving ownership of the brand to the audience, who anyways owns the brand. AXN understands this better than other entertainment channels, probably because its audience is more tech-savvy than the rest. Thus, they offered the driving seat of the social media campaign 'Supernatural Fantasy Plotline,’ created by the channel for the ninth season its successful TV series 'Supernatural.' Let's see how effective the campaign was.

Objective

The main objective of the campaign was to create a sustainable pre-launch buzz for the 9th season of AXN's successful TV series 'Supernatural' with an aim to engage its loyal fans in what was to become the first of its kind initiative by any television channel in India.

Execution

To run the contest, AXN's social media team has created a hashtag (#SPNFantasyPlot), which the participants had to use to tell AXN what turn the Winchester Brothers' story would take from the season 8's cliffhanger, allowing fans to build their own Supernatural Fantasy Plotline.

The contest ran both on Facebook and Twitter and individual winners from the two were selected (see below) and they were given ownership of the brand on social media.

@Samsmine Take part in #SPNFantasyPlot & tell us how you'd continue the story! You could win a signed T- shirt from Jared Padalecki! :D

— AXN India (@AXNIndia) October 7, 2013

The first-of-its kind brand takeover initiative propelled the #SPNFantasyPlot hashtag to trend to #2 in India reaching out to 46,300 people and garnering 7,01,200 exposures, on the evening of the show's premiere.

Guys, give a warm welcome to our #SPNFantasyPlot winner @ZENIADCUNHA, as she takes over the @AXNIndia handle for the premiere of #SPN9OnAXN!

— AXN India (@AXNIndia) October 11, 2013

Positives

The TV channel has showed how social media can be used to engage a television audience. It is almost like a copybook style of social media engagement: AXN gave their loyal fans a cue to build a story, and at the end of each day a plot line was selected from Facebook and Twitter, which was taken as the next day's starting point in the plotline, and then winners were selected.

On the design front, the social media team running the campaign did a nice job. It has not only created separate visuals for plotlines to take the story forward, it has also crafted posts to boost engagement, as you can see below.

Scope for Improvement

AXN has done a wonderful job in all aspects of the campaign, and there is little that the brand should have done differently, other than running the campaign for a little longer. Social media provides scope for a brand to build up, and running it for more than 3 days would have caused more ripples.

Conclusion

AXN's Supernatural Fantasy Plotline was a well-planned and nicely executed campaign. It'll set a precedent for other TV channels to follow suit, and has showed other channels how to use social media to engage their loyal fans.