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Let’s say you’re a major broadcast network marketing department faced with crafting a campaign for one of the tentpole premieres of your fall season. Already, that’s a task that’s likely to cause a bit of stress.
Now add in the fact that the campaign is for a totally new format that’s virtually unknown in America, the cast is a secret, and there is no footage from the series available for promos and art.
Welcome to the brave new world of marketing Utopia on Fox.
“This challenge is keeping us on our toes; it’s changing every day,” said Laurel Bernard, Fox’s EVP of marketing and media. “It’s an interesting campaign, and it’s totally different from the normal way we do a [premiere] campaign.”
A quick refresher for those unfamiliar with Utopia: the show is Fox’s ambitious new year-long reality series—the network is billing it as a “social experiment"—that follows 15 contestant “pioneers” who leave their normal lives and are sequestered in a closed location to work together to create a new civilization from scratch.
The format originated in The Netherlands, where it was the highest rated unscripted premiere in six years for broadcaster SBS6.
The American pioneers are now sequestered in their purpose-built set in the Santa Clarita area, north of Los Angeles. Don’t let the word “set” fool you either. Pioneers arrived to find a stable with a chicken coop and two cows, a barn for the pioneers to sleep in, and a self-filtering lake. That’s it. No running water, and no electricity.
The show is completely different from your normal reality show,” Bernard said. There’s no producer interference. There aren’t even camera crews: the action is all captured by robotic cameras.
Fox is going big for the premiere, stretching it into a three-night event. The first NFL doubleheader of the season will serve as the lead-in for the debut episode on Sunday, Sept. 7.
Bernard said the network hopes to use football’s huge audience as a launch platform to introduce the series and the pioneers to American viewers.
The campaign itself is very media heavy, with lots of cable, print, and online—just in a much shorter window than a network might normally use.
“We usually stretch it out further, but we wanted to take advantage of footage from the real Utopia,” Bernard said.
Of course, the campaign hasn’t been completely dark until now.
Leading into the launch, Fox got around the lack of footage by focusing on trailers and digital video that serve as intro pieces or backgrounders for the series.
The official trailer released about three weeks ago featured Executive Producer Jan de Mol setting up the format alongside footage from the Dutch series. There was also a nod to De Mol’s success in the reality sphere.
The network has also used shareable countdown images on social media sites to introduce viewers to some of the big themes of the series, while building anticipation for the launch:
For the past week, viewers have been able to start watching the Pioneers via the 24/7 livestreams that are another feature of the series. More than one million people watched those streams within the first five days, according to the network.
And while the cast has now been revealed to the world, they still aren’t available for major stunts or promotion.
“They’re sequestered there, so we can’t use them the way we might normally use talent,” Bernard said.
The unique constraints of the series have also caused the marketing and publicity teams at Fox to adopt to a new work rhythm. They’re new to the format just like the audience, and the series is completely unscripted, so they have no idea what’s coming down the pipeline. Promos, videos, and other marketing material are having to be turned around in rapid-fire succession now that the Pioneers have started constructing their society.
Bernard says that the marketing and publicity teams have more hands on deck than usual, with about 25-30 core people touching the series at any given time. They have also embedded some marketing team members directly with the production crew at the Utopia site to help identify material to push out to the public, pulling material from live streams, and creating promos on the fly.
“It’s pretty crazy and we’re just figuring out how we’re going to systematize this,” Bernard said, when asked about the challenges of marketing a year-long unscripted series.
Much of the campaign will come together as the story lines on the series develop over time.
“That’s part of the beauty of having a real-time, unplanned social experiment,” she said.
While the show’s Pioneers might be unavailable for publicity, Fox has enlisted talent from another network property—American Idol—to help build awareness of the series. Idol alum Chris Daughtry recorded the theme song for the series, an adaptation of the music used for the Dutch version of Utopia.
A series of pre-broadcast headlines this week have helped spread the word, as well, with one cast member briefly requiring hospitalization for dehydration. The show’s producers also held a conference call with press on Wednesday to tease out some of the story lines that have been developing since the Pioneers entered the site last week.
Late Wednesday the network also finally released their first :30 promo featuring episodic footage. The spot promises a “brave new world” full of conflict, rivalry and… pregnancy:
“When our viewers and the people who start to hear about the show through word-of-mouth start to tune in, and when the show starts to get into the groove, people are going to be amazed at how real everything feels,” Bernard said.
Utopia premieres on Fox, Sept 7.
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