The end is near.
Vikings has established itself as the premiere scripted show on HISTORY with a rabid fan base to feed.
As the series entered its final season, our task was to launch a social campaign to drive hype around the concept, “The end is near,” and challenge the Vikings community to theorize about how it would all unfold.
We introduced The Seer on Instagram as our central campaign vehicle to tease prophecies and engage with fans while staying in the Vikings world.
How do you make HISTORY’s most social show even more social? Before the final season of its most popular original scripted series ever, our task was to create a campaign that would capture the show’s already highly engaged audience and accelerate them to an even higher state of frenzy.
Resurrecting a deceased soothsayer to live on @historyvikings’s Instagram seemed the perfect vehicle to tease possible plotlines and theorize popular characters’ deaths. We deep-dived into previous seasons to link past prophecies mentioned by The Seer to what might or might not happen, focusing on a four-week pre-premiere window to stir fans up.
Sharing space with the client’s regularly scheduled postings, our creative needed to cut through, so we tried something that could be considered the opposite of best practice. We posted the same image multiple times in the feed to signal the arrival of The Seer and one of his “visions” for fans to respond to. Many, including the client, were concerned that users would assume the content was old and not engage. However, the intention was to get fans familiar with The Seer’s calling card and relate it directly to our campaign, and it worked.
On the day of premiere, our Seer unleashed a heavily obscured death scene involving a popular character (without revealing his/her true identity), sending fans into a further craze.
Ultimately, the strategy of employing a half-dead being with his frustratingly accurate, yet not-at-all obvious, prophecies paid off.
