Forget traditional marketing. If you want to launch a hit piece of content right now, assign a home-bound audience of amateur investigators to solve a real-life crime with one simple message."Do your own research."As if we needed more proof that we have way too much time on our hands and an unsettling dearth of hobbies we enjoy filling it with, “Unsolved Mysteries” sat at number 1 on the Netflix Top 10 list all of last week until it was unseated by “The Old Guard.”The success of “Unsolved Mysteries” has more in common with the movements around QAnon and Ghislaine Maxwell than it does with the big budget marketing campaign around “Stranger Things,” its sibling series. Anyone who watched TV in the late-1980s and 90s remembers “Unsolved Mysteries,” the pulp docu-series that mixed U.F.O.s, haunted houses and Bigfoot with true crime murders and mixed schlocky re-enactments with traditional documentary. This month, a refresh by the executive producer of “Stranger Things” premiered on Netflix.
The timing was perfect, not because of what has changed in the world since the series ended its original run in 2002, but because of what has changed in the world since “Stranger Things” aired in the late 2010s. In 2020, millions of people spend seemingly all their waking hours trying to solve crimes together on the Internet. Just last week, a Reddit community convinced themselves that several missing children were being trafficked and sold online by the furniture seller Wayfair, creating millions of mentions on social media that continues to suck in more amateur detectives. The Wayfair conspiracy theory community is an offshoot of QAnon, a full-blown subculture that more resembles a religion than a fleeting curiosity in its adherents' total devotion to it. People spend so much time investigating QAnon that family members consider them lost to it. A motto of the QAnon community, the one that sets many adherents down their path? "Do your own research."Meanwhile, a mirror image community has sprung up around the arrests of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, both charged with the sexual abuse of minors.
Entire identities have been formed around the amateur investigation of the Epstein/Maxwell network. It feels like the team behind "Unsolved Mysteries" could sense the enormous reserves of free time people have now and their willingness to spend it researching conspiracy theories. “Stranger Things” famously went huge with traditional marketing, relaunching "New Coke" and buying spots during the Super Bowl. But "Unsolved Mysteries" has almost zero traditional marketing. Netflix has run exactly one piece of creative as a banner ad for about one week and one TV spot that ran 31 times over four days with a minuscule $25,000 spend behind it. The show's tagline for that tiny ad campaign, "Help solve a mystery," is a barely-veiled variation on QAnon's "Do your own research." Instead of a big marketing campaign, they tasked an enormously bored audience with solving crimes from home, first by simply dumping these cases onto their TV screens and then by dumping a trove of documents onto Reddit to help spur the community of amateur investigators that quickly formed around the show and give them something to do for an infinite number of hours. They did their own research.
The show's success proves people have way too much time on their hands, but it also proves that telling them to fill that time with their own research is exponentially more effective than telling them to fill that time with the content itself.
The shorter stuff
🌀Another "Netflix Hegemony" Section
Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are starring in a Netflix movie next month about a pill that puts you on X-Men shuffle mode for five minutes. (YouTube)
85 million people watched "Spenser Confidential." (Bloomberg)
It’s insane how good this summer has been for Netflix when you consider the blockbuster movies it's had, like "the Old Guard," and the conjecture that "Tenet" might not make it to theaters this summer. (Vulture)
Carrie Battan gets Desus and Mero to open up about their goals, which seem to me to be a combination of editor and mogul. I absolutely support and relate. (TNY)
The New York Times has 10 scripted TV show projects in development. (Axios)
Peacock's tagline is, "Great Entertainment Is Finally Free." NBC is the oldest major broadcast network in the US, founded in 1926. (YouTube)
The things people did for Instagram at Jake Paul’s party include driving a G wagon into the house and hanging off a bulldozer. (Vulture)
Check out how unappealing the promotional shot for this new David Schwimmer show is. (VF)
Please report back to me if you listen to Apple News' podcast answer to the Daily. (THR)
"Working closely with 'Normal People' intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien..." I said it in this newsletter when the trailer for Peacock's "Brave New World" first dropped: it looks good. (VF)
If you're enthusiastic enough about working from home that you'd spend $599 on a Zoom-made appliance, we are very different. (The Verge)