I’m pretty sure the following statement is rooted in science: Breaking Bad is the best show ever. I started watching the series one sweet August day and was finished within three weeks, binge watching on nights, weekends and anytime in between.
Because of this unconditional love for Breaking Bad, I feel some sense of loyalty to Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad step-sibling set to premiere this weekend. By proxy, I want it to succeed and prosper and grow into its own behemoth.
Unfortunately, I’m just not that interested in it.
The importance of getting in front of the right people, at the right time, with the right message is second to none in marketing. Granted, the show hasn’t yet premiered so I lack ratings intelligence, but I also feel like my interest hasn’t been adequately piqued. The opportunity is there, from myself and from others like me, and Better Call Saul would be smart to capitalize on the Breaking Bad audience to drive up ratings and interest.
Here’s how:
Any great campaign begins with a solid foundation of market research—obtaining a deep intelligence of your existing and/or desired audience to stack the conversion odds in your favor. As we can see from the overlap model below, Breaking Bad has a far larger audience than Better Call Saul, with only 3% follower overlap. This presents a huge opportunity for Better Call Saul to piggyback on the coattails of the Breaking Bad fan base, leveraging that audience to create their own larger audience.
One surefire way to accomplish this would be through paid media. Clearly Breaking Bad has a strong online presence with over a million brand followers. Utilizing topic models that would allow Better Call Saul to speak the language of the Breaking Bad fan base, paid media targeted at the right crowd of influencers could be a strategic solution to help spread the word. Utilization of less-targeted paid media campaigns to the wider Breaking Bad audience could also be a good brand awareness exercise.
Additionally, Netflix is a major topic of conversation within the Breaking Bad audience base. Stitched together with the dominant persona “Driven Professional,” it seems safe to say that I’m not the only one binge watching on my second screen. Proper paid media campaigns to this always-on-mobile-device audience will encourage a secondary crowd (primary crowd being the TV viewers) to gravitate towards the full-season reruns when the time comes for Netflix release.
A great deal of Breaking Bad fans are spread out across the west coast, and so Better Call Saul may choose to focus traditional advertising (billboards, TV commercials) in this region.
Finally, the Breaking Bad audience is full of image sharers, signifying a need to use visual media in messaging efforts–videos and images mixed with the language the audience is already using. As we can see in the image below, the audience is also interested in the paranormal, wildlife and, oddly enough given meth isn’t organic, gardening. Perhaps this signifies a good opportunity to advertise on like shows or networks (Sci Fi, HGTV, Nat Geo, Animal Planet).
Better Call Saul has a competitive advantage in the new show marketplace, with a significant existing target fan base to pull from. But most programs, not to mention brands, have an aspirational competitor, and the more they look to understand and utilize that audience, the more likely they will be to gain that fan base as their own.
*For this project, I analyzed a sample of the “Better Call Saul” audience compared with a sample of the “Breaking Bad” audience. Note that this analysis could be done across different properties or groups: AMC vs. like network, actor vs. actor, etc. My main point of ingestion was Twitter, but easily could have been any other social network, CRM, house list, transactional data, or mixture of all of the above.
To see how I did it, request a demo of the People Pattern platform below.
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