Como.. “Speak Spanish like El Patron”
Narcos Social Media Campaign Analysis
Narcos is a Netflix production which presents the life of the most famous Colombian drug trafficker, Pablo Escobar as well as the many other drug kingpins who plagued the country through the years. When Netflix first launched the bilingual (largely spoken in Spanish with English subtitles) show in 2015, it quickly became very popular among crime series fans.
Narcos’ first season on Netflix was a total hit. When it was about time for the world’s leading Internet television network to launch a second season of the show, the producers would come up with something really brilliant and would take their fan’s enthusiasm for the show even further.
In practice, they executed a social media monitoring which led to the insight that not only were the fans of the drama obsessed with the series itself, but they were also hooked on the Spanish language spoken. They would tweet about how Narcos is pretty much Spanish lessons. Fans turned out to be really … studious, so what the producers had to do was simply fulfill this desire for Spanish lessons.
In the run up to the launch of Narcos Series 2, they came up with a series of Spanish lessons in collaboration with the leading language app, Babbel. The main characters of the drama were the “teachers” of the interactive lessons that were consisted of words and phrases from the episodes. Lessons were available in six languages ( English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish) and they took the fan mania on social media even further.
Going back to the initial step of this data-driven Social Media Campaign, we would expect that the strategy would begin with the determination of the desirable goals. There was clearly a level of engagement existent, as indicated from the social media monitoring. The show’s Facebook page also shows that users are really excited to comment on its content while ‘binge-watching”. The goal here was to maintain and also scale the engagement up. Furthermore, the campaign aimed at reaching new audience and spreading awareness about the Netflix brand and the new season coming up. Lastly, the edgy character of the lessons and especially the lessons would familiarize the new viewership and make the fans keep in touch with the show’s brutal character.
The results of the campaign were more than satisfactory ;
· More than 12 million views
· 40% increase in followers
· More than 50 million people reached
Fans of the show loved the lessons so much that they couldn’t get enough of them, “they even had withdrawal”. References of the #NarcosSpanishLessons and individual posts about the lessons were “flooding” in social media as users seemed to really enjoy them.
This case is what we call smart social media marketing. One of the secrets to its success here is the way that Netflix relies on its social audience to build viewership. This is especially true for companies like Netflix, who cannot afford frequent commercials that traditional television networks pump out. Until now, the series has picked up an incredible amount of buzz and viewers thanks to its viewer-centric strategy which is highly important in the social media dominated era.
The Ogilvies : Danai Lyratzi Xenia Ntavranoglou Stavroula Pollatou Ioanna Thanasi Katerina Tsigarida
Ad and PR Lab coordinators : Betty Tsakarestou Lina Kiriakou
