Amazon
Prime Video
The Boys
AGENCY // Movement Strategy
ROLE // Senior Art Director
YEAR // Summer 2024
Diabolical Work
Amazon partnered with our agency for the fourth season of its hit show, The Boys. I was tapped to lead the week-to-week ideation, concept write-ups, and the motion graphics look and feel for a full season of social content across Instagram, X, TikTok, and YouTube.
The rub? The Boys was such a success that Amazon Prime had upgraded it to a Tier 1 Title, meaning every piece of content would not only be run domestically, but across all international channels as well. Brazilian fans are the best, so you know we were excited to have them join the fun.
ACCOUNT TEAM // Elyse Runkle, Aimee Keenan, Kelly Rhone
STRATEGY TEAM // Ryan Joseph, Margie Guy, Anna Norfield
CREATIVE TEAM // Roland Parker, Rajiv Smith-Mahabir, Richie LaRuffa, Danica Carrigg, Austin Steele
The Client
Amazon Prime Video’s marketing endeavors are as robust as they are rapid. It takes an exceptionally sharp mind to handle the day-to-day, and we were blessed with a small team of clients who were as sharp as they come.
It was the closest I’ve ever worked with a client– Slacking at all hours about small seeds of ideas, developing IRL events we could parody, and going over updates from the director and actors.
A lot was asked of them, and in turn, a lot was asked of us. That’s how it should be when the stakes are high.
The Audience
The Boys boasts a zealous, clever fandom who love to role play as brainless consumers of Vought content (the ethically dubious media giant in the show’s universe).
They comment on posts at an enviable rate, leaving paragraphs ranting, in character, about plot points. It was a social media advertiser’s dream; we just had to give them the right breadcrumbs to lead them to the right destinations (as well as throw them off the trail when they got too close to figuring out a spoiler.)
The Initial Challenge
The pace was extremely fast and expectations were high.
The ideas we presented needed to be extremely sharp: politically, satirically, and visually.
They also needed to stand up to the scrutiny of a host of stakeholders: Amazon executives, Amazon lawyers, our client who built the brand, and the fans themselves.
This was going to be a hot summer.
Our Approach
We pitched, wrote, and filmed the majority of our video content months before the show’s premiere. To address the small shifts in messaging, tone, and context that were necessary to adequately meet the day-to-day news cycle, we utilized three methods:
Daily conversation sweeps were discussed during stand-ups to identify upcoming opportunities and pitfalls. These led to viral same-day pieces parodying trending Tweets (e.g. Homelander-branded sneakers) as well as AVOIDING being the viral mess-ups of the day by rolling out a piece of content that was off-base for the moment.
Auxiliary talent shoots aided two pieces that needed to shift angles slightly. We were able to collaborate with Karen Fukuhara, Kimiko, to rerecord portions of revised scripts.
“Fix it in post” usually indicates something wasn’t planned beforehand, but in our case, it was a way to stay flexible as we finalized cuts and built out asset packages for international markets.
Our Real Challenge
The real challenge of the season came to light as real-life events began to mirror episodes of the show, nearly in lockstep.
Protestors clashing with police, power officials going on trial, and election ticket changes were just a few of the topics we had to navigate in our campaign approach.
Our Output
Because of the series’ success, Prime Video upgraded season four of The Boys to what they call a “Tier 1 Title.” That meant all asset deliveries would require not one MP4, but eight crops, working builds, textless masters, and well as versioned graphics packages – the works.
This new 12x scope for key assets, along with the day-to-day changes that were happening due to events in the news, meant we had to invent new workflows that would save us 12x the amount of time we were spending versioning.
I led the motion graphics side of the effort, creating responsive hero alpha animations in After Effects and Blender (extremely NSFW, be warned) and working with designers to build out the other sizes.
My editor partner, Rajiv Smith-Mahabir, led the edit scaling, implementing file setup strategies to maintain flexibility while utilizing cloud services to speed up collaboration.
In all, we created over 150 deliverables for this campaign.
Campaign Results
Wins
The Tier 1 rollout was successful. The full international build-out was a success after learning from our Gen V production.
The fandom strengthened. Vought’s meddling ramped up in season 4, and our Vought International account ramped up our rhetoric to match. Fans commented at a higher rate then ever before. I never saw a metric for “average length of comment,” but it has to be up there for this campaign.
Learnings
Reactive content won the day. Our most successful pieces were not ones we had planned before the season, they were in response to cultural moments that made sense for our brand to engage with (the inappropriate popcorn bucket trend, weird politician grifts, and bold-faced corporate lies among them.)
Final Takeaway
Entertainment campaigns often allow marketers to play make-believe for a moment, building a story and world for fans to live within.
We had the opposite experience in the summer of 2024, as our story and the story of the world at large collided. We had to be perpetually in-tune with our fandom on Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram, listening to what they were latching onto and what they were rejecting.
I’m proud of our team for executing a steep scope on a tight timetable, all while pitching quick-turn, day-of content to our client daily.