COMPANY
Amazon Prime Video
ROLE
Art Director
YEAR
2019
This award-winning, diabolically dynamic campaign introduced the dark and irreverent first season of Amazon's popular original series The Boys. In order to market the show honestly yet considerately, we needed to walk a fine line between gratuitously TV-MA creative that could offend some customers and overly-censored creative that would water down and misrepresent the tone and content of the show. We stayed away from photo-realistic creative and leaned into a street art expression of our debased superhero characters for the main key art in order to communicate the violent nature of the series without being too obscene. The tagline "Never Meet Your Heroes" spoke to the themes of corporate corruption and the seedy underbelly of celebrity that are central to the series, and we approached each detail of the campaign through the lens of The Boys' "f*** superheroes" attitude.
The team brought home two Clio Entertainment Awards for this campaign, taking bronze in both the Integrated Campaign and Key Art categories for Television/Streaming.
The campaign kicked off at New York Comic Con in 2018, where we debuted our tease art featuring the cryptic Boys manifesto to delight and surprise existing fans of The Boys comic world and spark intrigue in those not yet familiar with the comic series.
Our next big campaign beat revolved around the Avengers: Endgame film release, utilizing both stationary and mobile billboards to shout our "f*** superheroes" message near theaters hosting the film's premiere.
We had an even larger presence at San Diego Comic Con in 2019, where we plastered our key art across wallscapes, busses, a step and repeat at The Boys panel and poster signing, as well as an immersive, experiential activation that allowed guests to step into the Audio-Visual store from the show. An AR Snapchat lens brought wild postings to life while guests waited in line to enter the experience.
To create something just as ridiculous as the character himself, we designed a super kitschy, limited edition promotional Deep calendar that was given away at San Diego Comic Con. The calendar was a huge hit with fans and press, becoming the most sought-after PR piece of the entire campaign.
To pay homage to the comic books, we recreated two of the original comic covers to be used for signing posters, out-of-home media, and social media.
We developed additional versions of art for creative optimization testing on Prime Video and Amazon.com to identify the highest performing creative patterns and which characters and storylines resonated most with customers to help inform future creative development.
We took to social media to expand the reach to our audience, with a custom Homelander Twitter emoji, character GIFs, and header images featured on both the series' and Prime Video’s social pages.
