No matter the level of quality, the greatest challenge for any show in its first season is generating awareness. That challenge goes double for a series like The Pinkertons, a Wild West detective show produced for first-run syndication.

“We don’t have the multi-million-dollar marketing budget that ABC or NBC does, or even AMC or A&E,” said Adam Moore, who created The Pinkertons with his partner Kevin Abrams. “So even as [the show] was getting cleared for all the markets in the U.S., we were very mindful about being able to pollinate it across multiple mediums… Because it’s syndication, we knew we needed another way to reach out to our audience.”

Produced in Winnipeg, the show’s Canadian production company, Buffalo Gal, partnered with the Manitoba-based interactive digital media company Tactica to help design an app that would “bring the audience into The Pinkertons world without the requirement that they have a lot of knowledge about what the show’s about yet,” said Tactica CEO and creative director Kevin Glasier. For that, they needed a standalone online experience that could be enjoyed on its own terms.

“We wanted to create the opportunity for grassroots marketing,” continued Glasier, “letting people create personalized content that’s sharable, branded and something they would distribute to their friends naturally.”

The idea Tactica pitched, and which was subsequently enthusiastically embraced by the show’s producers, plays like a digital version of the costume areas at history museums where visitors can try on garb from different time periods. Embedded into the show’s website, Outlaw Yourself lets users upload a photo of themselves or pull one in from Facebook, then merge it with one of several 1800s-era characters ranging from gunslingers to prisoners, sheriffs, saloon girls and even fortune tellers. “We wanted to let people see what they’d look like in The Pinkertons’ Old West era,” said Glasier.

The resulting experience, Outlaw Yourself, achieves a feedback loop of organic social marketing goals.

“In addition to creating something users want to share, we’re creating something their friends want to look at,” Glasier said. “But it’s more than seeing an ad for The Pinkertons go by… They’re seeing their friend [who shared the photo] essentially integrated into an ad for The Pinkertons.”

The hope is that it’s a compelling enough device that the receiving friend, who has no prior awareness of the show, will click on the photo link in their feed, if only for the chance to Outlaw Themselves in a similar fashion. But of course doing so takes them into the world of the show at pinkertonstheseries.com, where a bastion of trailers, cast bios, where-to-view info and other treats awaits.

To cull the Old West characters users can picture themselves as, Tactica teamed with the show early in the production, coordinating photos of more than 100 extras costumed for shooting.

“We really wanted for these to be from actual Pinkertons actors in costume,” said Glasier. “It’s great when producers are onboard like that from the start. Some shows wait until the second season before creating a digital media companion but getting out of the gates and getting in front of the audience in front of the broadcast date can really help build some buzz.”

Sweetening the app’s deal, Tactica and the show’s producers ran a contest sponsored by Manitoba’s tourism board, which offered a lucky winner the chance to visit the set of The Pinkertons in Winnipeg and see how the world of Old West Kansas City gets brought to life in the middle of Canada. That winner has been announced but the app will live on at show’s website “for as long as we desire to fund the hosting of it,” said Moore. “We can use it now as a launch pad for anything else we want to do, whether it’s another contest, general awareness about the show or announcing the second season.

“Our syndication team handed down a motto to me that I love,” he continued: “‘We’re getting viewers two eyeballs at a time,’ so any chance we have for fan interaction is great.”

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