NETFLIX

Lead Agency

MEC GLOBAL SOLUTIONS

BETTER CALL SAUL: YOU FOUGHT THE LAW AND YOU WON

The Challenge

Better Call Saul wasn’t a spin-off from Breaking Bad but part of the Netflix DNA of great characters; edgy narrative and phenomenal production values. Our challenge was to reinforce Netflix’s heritage of great, original stories and also exciting new audiences to the service, the show itself and ensuring Breaking Bad fans stayed with Netflix.

Spin-off’s are everywhere and most of them fail due to a lack of orginality and excitement about the stories and the characters. Better Call Saul needed to not just stand on its own two feet but become part of popular culture and conversation at its launch.

The Strategy

Saul Goodman isn’t just any lawyer, if you’re bang to rights – Saul will have your back like no-one else.

Our idea was to take Saul from the service to the streets and screens that surround our audience with personalised and highly targeted “legal” advice from Saul himself.

We took this advice to the spaces, places and moments consumers bend the rules for their own gain. Want to know where to travel the underground for free? How best to launder dirty money? This wasn’t about ethics; this was about getting what you want with contextual and humorous help from the dirtiest legal mind in fiction.

The Better Call Saul “You Fought the Law and You Won” Campaign.

The Implementation

Every execution a creative and contextual interaction with Saul.

In TV; we created bespoke pieces of advertising that directly connected Better Call Saul to the programming the advertising appeared in. UK: The Jeremy Kyle Show – “need a DNA test? Better Call Saul”. Germany: Cherry-pick the most popular crime dramas and connect the advertising message to the plot of the show; – “Did the shooter miss? Sue the gun manufacturer!”
In OOH across the region with highly specific messages in exactly the right-place. Bespoke placements would tell you which stations had ticket barriers; how to speak Chinese to avoid being pulled over by traffic police or where speed guns were situated and how to get fake a taxi receipt for a personal bonus.

We also brought Saul’s unique brand of advice to digital by re-writing the headlines on major sites as if he was defending the wrongdoer. Always funny and always legal. In Germany, a team of copywriters were writing digital advertisements live based on the news of the day and the exact
page the ad was appearing in. How to make money disappear in stories about Greece’s financial crisis and how to properly cheat in video games articles and how to get away with it.

In Mobile we created a media-first with “Saul is Calling” – a mobile ad format that imitated “calling” screens, if the call was “picked up” a message from Saul telling you he could get you off any charge. Even if you did do it.

Thousands of creative executions across screens and streets that emotionally connected Saul with its audience.

The Result

Better Call Saul had on average more than 4 times the conversations than its direct competitor, Mad Men, and created hundreds of thousands in free media exposure with the campaign. Better Call Saul out-stripped nearly every other linear TV show launch in our major markets; including Fortitude in the UK which had 5 times the media budget and a massive collection of TV-owned channels.

Netflix keep their cards close to their chest when it comes to viewers; but Better Call Saul didn’t just extend the Breaking Bad story, it created a new cult programme that showed that if you want new, original, iconic programming – Netflix Originals is your only choice.