Telegraph Puzzles Joined Netflix’s Thursday Murder Club
Category:
Publishing Excellence Awards
Best Creative Solutions Led / Content Marketing Campaign
Netflix needed to create a high-profile, high-impact launch for The Thursday Murder Club in a highly competitive streaming market. To do this, they sought unique media-first activations that would drive conversation, specifically to The Thursday Murder Club, so audiences could feel like they were part of the experience. They also need to ensure that they were reaching existing fans of Richard Osman’s books, and to build new audiences for the franchise.
The Telegraph’s Puzzles team’s idea was to mirror the mystery, fun, and essence of The Thursday Murder Club within their Puzzles product. For the first time in their 100-year puzzling history, the team created a series of murder-mystery puzzles for the paper, inviting readers to crack the case and identify the killer.
Over four weeks, the team also took over The Telegraph’s most-played online puzzles, linking the clues to the film and cast. Collections of these online puzzles were released every Thursday, of course.
Both the print and digital puzzles were clearly branded as The Thursday Murder Club and introduced players to the film and cast.
Print and Digital Display ads ran across The Telegraph’s titles to raise awareness of the collaboration, inviting readers to stop killing time and join the club. A special email was sent to 6.5 million, explaining how the team had conspired with Netflix to create a suitably fiendish set of blood-soaked teasers, themed around Mr Osman’s books and the eponymous film.
Sponsorship of The Daily T podcast – which invites listeners to step into the newsroom to hear from the journalists who have broken the day’s biggest stories – enabled the Puzzles editor to join the hosts to talk about the partnership and encourage budding sleuths to take up the challenge.
The campaign was hugely successful in driving both impressions and clicks, and the featured puzzles saw an 88% completion rate (10% higher than normal). Crucially, 79% of readers who recalled the campaign indicated that they had watched or planned to watch the film, and two in five who recalled the campaign were ‘very likely’ to talk about The Thursday Murder Club to someone else.
