Reaching the Unreachables

Mediahub was tasked with launching season three of Black Mirror on Netflix, a sci-fi anthology series exploring the wonders and horrors that result when humanity's greatest innovations collide with its darkest instincts. Our target--25–34 tech savvy hardcore sci-fi fans--was highly skilled in avoiding advertising. In fact, more than two-thirds of them had ad blockers installed on one or more devices, creating a steep challenge. We needed this discerning group of ad haters to not only notice our campaign, but love it enough to become advocates and share it.

Our solution was to reach this unreachable audience with a first-to-market media hack that circumvented ad-blocking software. We selected three of our target’s favorite destinations as our partners: Mashable, The Next Web and Slate, sites that indexed disproportionately high against our target, had scalable audiences and are known for featuring content that gets shared prolifically across the web. We worked with each publisher to build our creative directly into their CMS so it wouldn’t be flagged by ad blockers upon page load. The result was a piece of native content with a message as unsettling as the series itself.

Social conversation was a testament to our success in creating a moment of joy for these discerning advertising haters, who instantly flocked to social media to share their love for the Black Mirror ads. Our efforts culminated in more than 1MM posts about the series, 30 times more conversation than season two. And the conversation spilled into entertainment publications with more than 20 sites globally covering the ad-blocking campaign, directly creating pop culture relevancy and a tremendous amount of earned media.