SHAMELESS: Custom Webisode
OVERVIEW
The popular SHOWTIME® series, Shameless had one of the most active and engaged fandoms and the largest social community with a total of 5.6M followers across platforms. This eager swarm of Shameless fans was always hungry for content, and in particular, content that was focused on their favorite Shameless couple, Ian Gallagher and Mickey Milkovich. And in Season 10, fan-favorite Mickey was making a comeback, allowing us to leverage his return and re-engage the vocal Gallavich fandom.
STRATEGY & EXECUTION
In developing our strategy, we assessed the large amount of search volume and social activity around Shameless’s beloved relationship “Gallavich.” Our strategy to target this core viewership was to create a digital webisode that featured Ian and Mickey in-character and took inspiration from a popular reality show format, with our own Shameless twist. To complement the on-air storyline, the Shameless writers scripted a narrative featuring the two talking about how annoying it is to be locked up together, how much they love each other, and how their relationship will change when Ian gets out. We then supplemented this never-before-seen interview footage with fan-favorite Gallavich moments. Our hope was that this webisode would feel like an inside look at a beloved part of the canon.
RESULTS
The Gallavich fans went wild for this bespoke content, even thanking the Shameless profiles for this early Thanksgiving treat. Without any paid media support, in just 24 hours of being live, we saw 263K combined views across Twitter, IGTV and YouTube, eventually rising to 700K Views. Our webisode outperformed all of our digital first content from the past two seasons with a whopping 2.2 million impressions on YouTube. Noel Fisher and Cameron Monaghan also posted the webisode on their own handles to their combined fanbase of 3M+ followers.
Nothing gets past the Shameless fans, who constantly troll our profiles for more Gallavich content, which made their positive reception to this original video even more rewarding. It was great to see the Shameless community engage by sharing their favorite moments with each other, making GIFs and even thanking us for answering their prayers. One fan encouraged us to “submit your social media campaigns to the Oscars” – so we plan on doing just that.