Sky promotes The Midwich Cuckoos with eerie children ‘escaping’ from billboard
In the build-up to the release of the latest Sky Original thriller The Midwich Cuckoos, Sky has delivered an out-of-home (OOH) experiential campaign replicating the suspense in the series.
Sky’s The Midwich Cuckoos OOH campaign
The OOH activation, developed in collaboration with Rapport and Ocean, relives the themes of the show and features the children behind the ‘Welcome to Midwich Town, drive safely’ board with an upturned bus lying next to them. A few other kids climb down from the show’s poster as creepy music plays in the background.
Another immersive activation at London’s Westfield White City retail complex sees seven life-like children, or cuckoos, escaping from the poster to create havoc in the real world. The activations are placed across OOH, cinema, TV, audio and social, with a particular focus on disruption and experiential.
For the cinema activations, the Ents Marketing team worked with DCM to disrupt a series of cinema adverts with teasers, creating ads within ads for cinema audiences.
The OOH campaign was further reinforced by an equally unsettling bus lenticular campaign that gradually reveals the cuckoos surrounding the show’s lead protagonist Dr Susannah Zellaby, played by Keeley Hawes. As well as the OOH special build, the campaign also features disruptive 3D audio ads across Spotify, ‘hijacked’ promo airtime ads across Sky and digital out-of-home (DOOH) ads that disrupt Sky Mobile advertising – the first time that Sky has disrupted its own brand advertising.
Sky‘s head of entertainment marketing Lucy Johnstone said: “This has been such an exciting campaign to work on for the entertainment marketing team. It was a fantastic opportunity to work collaboratively with our partners to create a standout campaign that faithfully reflects the disruptive nature of the cuckoos in the show. It was a lot of fun throughout and I’m proud of the brilliant team effort that went into the campaign.”