Ads typically follow a narrative arc – a couple enjoys a night in, a drink spills on the couch, a celebrity magically appears to present the cleaning remedy. Those stories are largely contained to a single ad. But what if that arc builds as does audience interest through a story developed across multiple ads shown in sequence to a viewer? It’s been done before.
A Nescafé Taster’s Choice campaign from the 1980s and 1990s told the story of a man and a woman who meet, dangling the question of whether they will — or won’t — get together over multiple spots.
“It might have been the earliest example of somebody doing a cliffhanger episodic TV campaign,” says Ken Pappanduros senior vice president and group creative director at agency RPA. “They finally do kiss, if you’re at all worried.”
That worry aside, a bigger concern may be how to pull off such a serialized story in an age when audiences’ attentions are split across so many screens and entertainment sources. Streaming seems to offer the answer, with ample opportunity to pull off episodic campaigns, between audiences’ binge-watching behaviors and streaming services’ technical capabilities. Here are three approaches marketers can take to pull off an episodic campaign.
The show-specific model
The most straightforward approach to executing an episodic campaign would be to attach it directly to an episodic series. LightShed Ventures partner Rich Greenfield laid out this model in a recent Signal Conversation with John Battelle. In his example, an advertiser would design a campaign to tell a story in parallel across a 10-episode arc of a show that people binge, such as Netflix’s “Wednesday” or “Squid Game.”
This approach would help to address one of the primary challenges with episodic advertising: the potential for audiences to be shown a campaign out of sequence.
“People are going to watch that show in an orderly fashion. You’re not going to watch episode three of [a show such as Paramount+’s] “School Spirits” without seeing episode one,” says Steve O’Connell, partner and co-chief creative officer at advertising agency RTO+P.
A marketer adopting this approach might want to consider how its campaign’s story complements that of the show. To use O’Connell’s example, “School Spirits” is a show set in a high school. An episodic spot set in a high school could link the campaign to the show, while keeping viewer’s attention when ads start. But associating an episodic campaign with a specific show comes with one major trade-off: It can limit the campaign to that show’s audience (or feel out of place if delivered against other shows).
The service-specific model
One way to sidestep the show-specific model is to design a campaign for a streaming service — not just one show. This approach allows marketers to broaden a campaign’s reach across a streaming service’s audience base, allowing the service to manage how audience members are shown the campaign. Farmers Insurance implemented this strategy in 2019 when it ran an episodic campaign on Hulu.
“We chose Hulu as a partner because – this was hard to believe at the time – nobody else could target ads sequentially to the same viewer like we wanted. I think it was too custom for algorithmic/programmatic platforms like YouTube,” says Perrin Anderson, senior vice president and creative group director at RPA.
Each of the campaign’s episodes broke down into three parts that would play in sequence across three different ad spots, all during a single episode of a show. By containing each ad episode to a given show episode, Farmers Insurance and its agency RPA ensured that the ads were shown in the right order. And it didn’t matter which show they ran against — the ads told a story through three different parts across one episode.
To connect the episodic parts even further, Farmers Insurance and RPA set up the ads to run as the first ad in each of three successive ad pods in each show episode. The ads also featured opening title cards and cliffhangers with a “To be continued” end card to communicate to the audience that each ad was part of a series.
The service-agnostic standalone model
For brands eyeing an episodic campaign, there are risks to consider. Intertwining storylines across multiple spots can mean a campaign’s success is tied up in audiences seeing as many of those spots as possible. Although the show- and service-specific models can improve the likelihood of people seeing every episodic ad, extending the campaign across streaming services can expand the potential audience.
In this model, the ads would still tell a serialized story, but each ad would need to be able to stand on its own and enable viewers to access its other parts on their own time. An episodic campaign that Saatchi & Saatchi created for P&G’s Downy Unstopables leading up to last year’s Super Bowl provides a template on how to navigate this well.
The campaign consisted of six episodic spots, and the connecting storyline centered around a celebrity (later revealed to be Danny McBride) who would not reveal themselves until they proved the product’s long-lasting freshness.
Although the ads carried a consistent storyline, they were also designed to be modular, says Chris Gilbert, vice president and director of experience strategy at Saatchi & Saatchi. That way, if a viewer was exposed to one out of sequence, they were still able to grasp the plot of the individual spot while also being made aware of the larger storyline and — crucially — given the opportunity to catch up on the other episodes.
“If you did see them out of order, they still essentially made sense,” Gilbert says. “And some of the language that was utilized in it were things like ‘I’m still here doing this sniff test’ to set the stage with each one. And then obviously people could go back and find the whole suite of work within our playlist on YouTube.”
For all the possible approaches to episodic advertising, however, any approach needs to start with the same first step: the question of whether the campaign objective justifies a serialized story.
“If it’s just a brand awareness play, I could see it working. Building affinity could be a reason to do it,” says Pappanduros. “If it starts to feel like a commercial broken up for the sake of getting more in there, I think you’re just going to lose people.”
