Apple TV+ SEVERANCE
From director and executive producer Ben Stiller and creator Dan Erickson comes “Severance.” Mark Scout (Adam Scott) leads a team at Lumon Industries, whose employees have undergone a severance procedure, which surgically divides their memories between their work and personal lives. This daring experiment in “work-life balance” is called into question as Mark finds himself at the center of an unraveling mystery that will force him to confront the true nature of his work… and of himself.
As production lead, Joey led the Severance social marketing campaign from ideation to execution. He collaborated with Ben Stiller and Media Arts Lab to develop and produce the following creative in support of the series rollout.
Severance - Campaign Highlights
Welcome to lumon
Most series campaigns launch with the same beat — a teaser or trailer. We shook up that approach on the Apple TV+ Severance campaign.
To kick off the marketing campaign of Severance, we launched a tease to the official teaser, which was created to be a warning shot for what was to come. A 6:35 video, with the post copy “Welcome to Lumon.” was posted on Severance Ben Stiller’s Twitter featuring the iconic winding walls of Severance’s Lumon Industries, with hopes of leaving fans confused, maybe concerned, and curious. The intentionally slow-TV piece acted as a cryptic introduction of our key talent—Adam Scott, Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman and Dichen Lachman. The goal of this piece was to leave fans asking questions, with intentions of following up with our official teaser the next day, which would go on to answer those questions.
The Tease to the Teaser
The Official Teaser
The onboarding
With the new Lumon employees (viewers) acquired it was time to onboard, with our ‘Welcome to Lumon’ Instagram Spread. The 10-panel carousel acted as an orientation with an office tour with Dylan G (Zach Cherry), a deep-dive into the severance procedure, an overview of the welcome survey, Lumon’s core principles and life at Lumon. The Instagram carousel was collab-posted with Ben Stiller to reach his nearly 6 million followers.
OFFICE TOURS
Any real company has a LinkedIn, so we figured Lumon Industries should as well. The Lumon Industries LinkedIn page became the first fictional business page on the platform, which became a destination for curious fans to learn more about the inner workings of the mysterious company. We hosted several onboarding materials, like our Dylan G. office tours, which we captured on set during production, with the collaboration of Director Ben Stiller and Writer Dan Erickson.
Twitter Q&A wITH THE CAST
To build a drumbeat ahead of the finale, we invited the cast, and Ben Stiller, to a Twitter Q&A, where fans could simply reply to our kick off Tweet and talent could reply directly to fans from wherever they were in the world. The Twitter Q&A would push fans to the premiere that day, and drive conversation ahead of the finale a week later.
S2 Announcment
Two days before the season 1 finale we released a surprising and well-warranted season 2 announcment across our platforms, letting our key megaphone (Ben Stiller) lead with the message.
THE FINALE
The in-season campaign finished on a strong note, with a finale release that had Severance trending #1 on Twitter, and in the top 10 for a span of 8.5 hours.
AMA WITH THE CREATOR
The Severance campaign leveraged focused efforts with notable talent promotion, so we wanted to give the super-fans an opportunity to connect with the creator of the series, Dan Erickson. For the prior 9 weeks, fan theories swirled on the r/SeveranceAppleTVPlus Reddit thread, with over 50k enthused Redditors, so we gave them an opportunity to ask the person who was behind their favorite mystery. The fan response was of such high-volume that Mashable covered the 15 revelations from 'Severance' creator Dan Erickson's Reddit AMA.