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CAMPAIGNS
THE DECADES
The challenges in marketing the decades series evolved as we moved from the Sixties all the way to the 2000’s, but there were some consistent issues. The first was the broad nature of the show and its range of tones. We worked hard to balance this out, while still appealing to our viewers nostalgia. We focused much of our effort on the series premieres, which were usually the TV episodes, so the campaign was a little more front-loaded on the lighter material, especially in the tease phase.
KEY ART
It would have been easy (and fun for us) to go retro for our key art/OOH and other display adverstising, but it felt harder to own that style in this space. We chose to focus on simple elements that could evoke each decade - TV's for the 60's, Polaroids for the 70's, VHS tapes for the 80's, iconic magazine covers for the 90's and tech devices for the 2000's. This gave us a lot of flexibility with the subjects we featured in each asset while allowing us to keep a clean modern look appropriate to the CNN Original Series Brand.
SOCIAL
CNN's social accounts experienced exponential growth over the run of Decades series. By the time we ran The Eighties, we had a good sense of what people responded to. CNN social audiences were still news consumers and responded strongly to informative content, but they were also older than the average social audience so the nostalgia factor was important in the context of this series. The series covered a lot of ground tonally from episode to episode so our campaign did as well. Nearly all the social assets for these series were completely original as the show did not really lend itself to clipping. We found success with custom graphics, including shareable quotes, and original digital videos.
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