So What? How Data Analytics Powered The Save Warrior Nun Campaign

Well, hey everyone, happy Thursday. Welcome to So What the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I am Katie, joined by Chris. Hey, Chris. Hello.

Uh a few weeks ago, according to Chris and John, I was in the woods hunting unicorns. And so now I have tagged in John, and it's now John's turn to go into the woods and hunt unicorns. So hopefully he will come back more successful than I was. I didn't find any, Chris, for the record. I mean, you know, the unicorns just the horn part, you know, some tears and anything will do.

I will keep that in mind for future reference. Uh on this week's show, uh, we actually have a couple of special guests. So we are talking about how data analytics powered the Save Warrior Nun campaign. And so we're gonna get into what all of that is. And so today we are joined by Laura and we are joined by Kelsey.

Thank you both for joining us. Yeah. Um, so I just want to sort of start at the top, and um, Chris, maybe you can give some background uh without getting into everything, but what is the Save Warrior Nun campaign? And then I want to get into how all of you uh were involved. So the very short version is there was a television series on Netflix called Warrior Nun.

Ran for two seasons, started in 2020, and then the final the second and final season or aired in November of 2022. Uh shortly thereafter, about a month after the season two premiere, uh, which uh for some strange reason Netflix does not promote, uh, they issued a cancellation notice on December 13th. And a whole bunch of fans of the show, I had never heard of the show, uh, a whole bunch of fans of the show had banded together and decided they would do their level best to try and get Netflix to essentially uncancel the show and continue the the story. Um so that's you know, the the campaign in a very, very small nutshell. It is a fan-led effort to try to uh get this story and this franchise to continue on past uh what Netflix was willing to invest.

And so the big question is have you since seen the show? I did. I I I forced myself to sit through it um in January, and it was okay. Um season one was a little slow, season two is better. Um and and here we are.

Um I've also I have seen the show, and I would agree with that. I think that compared to both season two definitely picked up the pace more than season one, but understanding that you have to get into the backstory as to why we're in the situation in the first place. Um but I think like the beach house scenes probably could have been, you know, they didn't need those. Anywho, uh so Laura and Kelsey, I would love to hear more about who you are, how you got involved. And so Laura, let's start with you.

Sure. So by profession, I'm a data engineer, work remotely. Um getting involved, I uh watched the show uh I think I started like a month before uh it was canceled. So, like basically right when it dropped, season two. Um, and when it was canceled, devastated like everyone else, but immediately people were jumping in on Twitter with the hashtag.

Um, and for about like two weeks, it was just tweeting away, and then there was a Twitter space where people were calling for people who wanted to hop in a Discord server and try and have some kind of like uh organized uh effort. So jumped right in, was thrown in the Discord server, and Kelsey, I think you were already there at the time, maybe for a few days. I think so, yeah. Yeah. So uh was a part of the uh data section of the initiative and uh worked really closely with Chris and um a couple others.

Uh and yeah, here we are. The show is uncanceled now. So successful campaign led by the fans. So very, very, very excited. And Kelsey, who are you?

How did you get involved? Um, I am Kelsey. Um regarding my career. I've kind of done a little bit of everything, um, but primarily finance, billing, accounts, accounting in general. Um I'd been a fan of the show since season one, and I actually was not aware that season two had come out until someone actually texted me and said that they saw it.

Um because I had not it didn't show up on Netflix, I didn't see any promo for it. So obviously, you know, been just watched it because you know, God forbid we go out of pace when we're watching new TV shows. Um and uh basically I think a week occurred and uh I had heard again from somebody else that it got canceled. So immediately I hopped on Twitter because I was like, all right, I know everyone's gonna head there. Um I had previous experience with another show that had gotten canceled that I tried to help get renewed.

That was a much smaller, much smaller fandom. That was the time traveler's wife on HBO, unfortunately that just died. Uh incredible show though. Um so with Warrior None, I saw a lot of people going back and forth and with the hashtags and discussions, and I kind of noticed that there were a couple people who are really leading uh, you know, kind of like the campaign, or like kind of bringing the fandom all together into one space. So I reached out to them and I was like, hey, just let you know I'm kind of noticing that people have opted for you guys to be like the leaders, right?

Um, and so I started talking to them and then talking to other people within Discord servers that you had already existed, um, started coordinating efforts with them, and it just grew and grew and grew and grew, and now here we are. And for those who aren't aware, uh a Discord server is a private social media platform similar to a Slack or some kind of a chat room. Yes, yep, exactly like that. Can you tell I'm not a heavy Discord user at all? Honestly, I wasn't either before this, so I still get very confused.

Yes, that makes me feel a lot better because according to Chris, it's like the easiest, most intuitive thing in the world. And I strongly disagree with that feeling. I have a hard time with Discord. There's too many lights and bells and whistles, and I like things very linear and organized, but to get back on track, um take me through a little bit of how this campaign got organized. So obviously, you know, you all saw a need to do something different than you've done before.

So going on Twitter, you know, asking Netflix to renew a show, it gets a little bit of traction, but it sounds like that's not the most effective thing. So at what point do the volunteers, were they all volunteers? Yeah. That's I mean, that's amazing. So what point are the volunteers who are trying to get the attention of Netflix sort of start to get organized and say, we need to do something different.

Here's what we need to do. What does that look like? Who would like to go? You can start. Go ahead.

Okay. Um, well, uh, you know, again, from what I saw, it was uh originally it started on Twitter spaces, so just a lot of you know commentary, um, disbelief that it was canceled, and uh, you know, an uproar, and rightfully so because it was kind of a discontinuation of representation um of the not only the Safic community, but the queer community in general. Um, and we've seen so much of that, especially in the past couple years. So to see it again and in such a way of a within a series that touched so many people. So, you know, it began on the Twitter spaces um of just a lot of people discussing, and then other people had, you know, various uh Discord servers.

So you had the bunker, you had uh Warrior None Netflix, you had um Save Warrior None, you had all these various Discords, but that built communities, and so that community basically with people within those wanted to do something more. So you had people who were going out and putting up posters, who are making shirts, who are you know going on Twitter, who were holding watch parties to boost viewership via Netflix. Um so with the order, it was more of who has experience within this sort of detail um and organization, but also are there professionals out there who can kind of like guide us so it's not just solely on Twitter, it's not just putting out hashtags. So it just kind of grew. I mean, uh, we had people who are amazing video editors, people that weren't graphic designers but learned the program in a really short amount of time.

Um, you know, shout out to Lucy, she is the person who really put forth our billboards, learned Photoshop in the span of six months, and had now has her work across various countries across the globe. Uh, shout out to CTS as well, it was their fan art that we used. Um, you know, we have graphic designers, video editors, uh, obviously our data team who the amount of hours and effort and they're telling us all of it, all this jargon. And me personally, I don't work in data, so I'm just sitting there going, that sounds nice. That's fancy.

Um, talk to me like I'm five, because I'm doing the best I can. So, you know, it's just like all these, and everyone just wanting to help each other. And I'm gonna pass the mic on to Laura now. Yeah, I think what I noticed uh initially is like there was so much noise on Twitter, so much, and there was media coverage of that, but it just wasn't, it was like kind of disparate, right? There was no organization of it.

So it was like this isn't gonna last. It's just not because it's just like screaming into the ether kind of in all different directions. So what the order definitely did, I feel like pretty quickly was organize it and focus it and then get all the fans operating with each other, because like the order would not be effective without the fandom at all. There all the work that we did would be for nothing. Um, so it was really about organizing the voice, is what how I saw it most of the time.

And the data team, um, especially with um so we can't see Netflix metrics, which is how the show got canceled. Um, so in order to not necessarily prove data-wise that it shouldn't have been canceled, that was kind of our mindset was like, why did it get canceled? We couldn't get a hold of their metrics, obviously. Um so in order to kind of feed the fandom like the real story that we could tell, we focused on things like lack of promotion, which was insane compared to the three other shows that were dropped at the same time. And then Robin, she has a parent analytics um subscription.

So she was actually looking at demand data, which allows you to look at like an apples to apples comparison with all shows, uh regardless of genre or platform um so the data was really used to fuel the fandom and kind of give a true narrative that Netflix wouldn't allow us to tell um so yeah that might have gone on kind of a tangent but I feel like it was like organization to create a louder voice was the biggest thing that I noticed with the order itself. No and I think that that's a really good point to bring up because you see this within different communities. You see this even within companies where everyone's just kind of doing their own thing off in different directions and nothing really gets done. And so you need that you know sort of strong organizational structure to bring it all together to start to tell one story. So I think it definitely highlights that you were borrowing from you know what you both knew of working you know in professional settings to say this is what we need to do in order to move this forward.

And so Chris how did you get involved? A friend of mine who uh Siwa who runs a Twitch uh channel uh at one point uh DM'd me because I was uh I was in the subscriber to her channel for a while and said um hey there's this group of people here that need some help with Twitter data and I know that data is kind of a thing you do can you come take a look at it um and so we got into a group chat at first and I looked at the initial uh reasonably well written requirements uh for people who are not data professionals and I said okay I mentally I was thinking this is really dumb. Um, this data is just such poor quality data that it it doesn't make a whole lot of sense what you're trying to do, but we can fix that. Um, it's very similar to some of the work we've done for our paying clients where we have you have data, you have information, but it needs to be organized, it needs to tell a story, it needs to be actionable. And that was the part where I felt like, okay, we can we can work with this.

So after that initial group chat, I got invited to the order discord server, um, met the rest of the team and said, Okay, well, what can we what do we have to work with? And that's a lot of what Laura was talking about in terms of parrot analytics and other forms of demand data. Search data was huge, uh, social media data, particularly, uh, and a very big shout out to our friends over at Talk Walker. Um, thankfully, they have actual enterprise software that works well with all these different social APIs. And so being able to extract data from that and then process it was uh instrumental in the campaign because a lot of what had been done up to that point was people manually checking free tools or low-cost tools and literally writing things down in a Google sheet hour by hour.

Like this there, there's several people who were just doing this at the campaign. I'm like, there's a better way to do this, folks. So uh my initial entre was helping organize the data that was there, and then we started digging into all these different data sources that are available. Again, ones that that you and I know, Katie, from uh a lot of our work with clients, things like search data. Search data is a great proxy for interest.

If no one's looking for you by name, you don't have a brand. So, how many people were searching for the TV show or the cast of the characters compared to other things? And that's where we started getting into a lot of the the more advanced stuff. Like, how do you infer what the demand was for the first season? Because most social media data doesn't go much back past a 13-month window.

And the first season was way back in 2020. So there's all these different ways to pull this data together and start coming up with a decisions that the team could make about what to do and where to promote, identifying influencers, identifying trends, identifying which existing efforts had worked well or not, and then creating actual data-driven content that other fans could share and you know, kind of call out the various powers that be at Netflix and other services to say, hey, this is a franchise, it's worth paying attention to so you have the data, you start automating a lot of the processes of the data collection and data analysis. And so what's next? How do you start deciding what tactics you employ within the campaign? Because I know a lot of people, when a show is canceled, to your point, they go to Twitter and they say, Save this show.

I can't believe the show was canceled. So it sounds like you saw that and said, that's too small. That's not enough to get the attention. So what came next? It's actually something that came before.

So one of the things that Kelsey and Sarah were responsible for was administering the GoFundMe, which was to raise funds to buy billboards. And this is something that's really interesting because in a lot of the time in the marketing work we do, something that's purely awareness-based really doesn't have you know uh easily tied to tangible results, right? You know, what's the what is the value of a bus wrap or a billboard? You know, we have you have to do very sophisticated stuff like uplift modeling to figure that out. But in the case of an awareness-based campaign where awareness is the objective, something like a billboard actually works.

And the reason for it is it's not an advertisement so much as it is a physical and tangible and very expensive way to demonstrate that there's value in what the community sees, and there's value in the fan base itself. Um, there was an interview in, I want to say it was Collider, I think, um, just a few days ago from uh Joaquin to Alameda, who played um Pope to Ready, uh, in which he was saying, you know, the fans did this thing, and he commented, oh, and billboards are in Times Square in New York are really expensive. So the fans were really dedicated, and for a lot of like the entertainment industry, those things that are offline that are rare and are expensive, get noticed, and that that creates coverage. And so the campaign has been a lot of how do we create physical milestones that are difficult to do? That to your point, Katie, set aside set it up apart from oh, it's just a bunch of people tweeting.

So, what were some of the tactics? So you used billboards, what were some of the other tactics that you used to drive awareness? Were there other social media platforms? Uh, what were some of the other campaigns? Kelsey, Laura, um uh so you know, initially, obviously it was Twitter.

Um, there were already uh Facebook pages made, so there was already some of the fandom over there too. But then we started to notice obviously uh more people were migrating to Instagram, to TikTok, to YouTube. Um so instead of keeping it just solely on Twitter and Facebook, because you know, especially for me as a millennial, I'm like, oh, well, those are the big ones, right? But it's we're we're kind of we tried to branch into um the younger generations thinking. Where are they?

What are they doing? Because they're also viewers, like more so than we are. So what are they paying attention to? So one, we had discussions, right? We asked people like, well, what do you spend the most time on?

What's like your attention span of what you're spending your time on? Um, and as we all know, we all love instant gratification. We love the 20-second TikTok videos where I might learn how to make a quiche in 20 seconds. I can save that video, and it's a recipe I can use for later, but I'm not watching something that's a four-hour video or reading it on a blog that you know, I have to skip down to the bottom to get to the recipe. So I think that was for us.

We got together with the video editors, we got together. Um, Coco manages our YouTube uh channel with Christopher, and they work really cohesively. Um, so there's like a team unit there, lots and lots of communication of okay, well, we can use this trending sound with this 15 to 20 second clip or this 45 second clip, um, add some special effects, and it gets spread around. So on TikTok, you easily repost it on Instagram, you have Instagram reels. So it's more so of just a plethora of communication with your team, um, and then making it easily uh absorbable, absorbable for like the you know, the main audience that you're trying to get.

What I love is with all of these complex things that you're doing, the core message, at least, and this is what we tell our clients, remains the same, is it doesn't matter what you're doing if you don't create valuable content that people want to pay attention to. And it sounds like with everything, you know, all the spokes off the wheel that you were working on, all the different tactics, valuable content that drove awareness was at the very center of it. And it was always thinking about what content can we create that someone's going to react to positively, negatively, at all. And so I love that you can sort of tie that, like that's the central part of your story. Yeah.

And speaking of that, I I just thought of uh Coco made a I can't remember which clip it was, um, but she on YouTube did like hashtag feminism or something like that. It got so much engagement, mostly negative, but it was just interesting that something like that was one of the ones that got us the most engagement. Um but aside from going into other platforms, one tactic that was really used pretty heavily was trying to get media attention because the more of that we could get, um, that wasn't just for the fandom for the encouragement of the fandom. So um the phrase team was working like every day, I don't know, like all the time based on the case. And less hours.

Yeah, um, coming up with phrases that um along with the hashtag we would try and trend like every day or every other day. Um and it worked, um, especially at the beginning, we got a lot of media coverage, and then um certain ones like was it Rise by Sexual Warrior? Yeah like that, got attention from the media and got a whole bunch of negative attention. Apparently, those words all together get a lot of attention. Um then on the data side, we would work with the phrase team on like, hey, we put together with the graphic designers this graphic on how little promotion the show got compared to Manifest or The Crown or oh my gosh, Wednesday.

And we would post that, we would tweet that out, and then there would be a phrase to go along with that to kind of boost it. Um, and that was to spread awareness of the fandom. And um, I don't know if the media ever picked up on any of those. I think a a couple of reporters that kind of followed us around, which was really nice, picked up on it. Um, but yeah, so there was like the media grabbing the media attention initiative, keeping the fandom involved, and then outreach was also sending so much communication directly to streamers as well.

So what I find really interesting is that you know, companies tend to shy away from garnering any kind of negative attention, negative impact. But it sounds like in this case that was working to your benefit because it was getting more reach. You were getting some kind of reaction uh out of people who were seeing this content. And so that to me is just that's a really interesting, you know, differentiator for this kind of a thing. Now, I know uh you also created a newsletter to help centralize communication.

Can you tell me a little bit about you know why that was necessary, how that came about, and you know, tell me about the newsletter itself. So that was part of so the newsletter and the website were were kind of a combo effort. Very early on. You know, one of the things, again, we we tell this to clients all the time. You don't own social media.

You don't own your your your Facebook page and your Twitter account and stuff. And as we've seen over the last six months with the giant, you know, molten dumpster. We're past burning. The dumpster is in Moulton now at Twitter. Um, and is just such an absolute disaster.

One of the first things we had to do was okay, how do we capture audience and attention and hold on to it? So part of it was you know setting up a website, uh, and part of it is getting the uh the a Substack newsletter, a very straightforward Substack newsletter, stood up very, very quickly, slapped Google Analytics 4 on it, Google Tag Manager, and uh put up a simple Google Looker Studio dashboard just to monitor it, and we could see what fans are interacting with, which issues, which topics. Um, we can see at the subscriber level who is opening what, how many uh people subscribed are are religiously opening the thing, and how many just you know signed up and then forgot about it. Um, the engagement rates were I I'm envious of. Um, you know, no newsletter I have ever published.

Actually, that's not true. I had another newsletter I published that had very high engagement. That was about the pandemic. So I seem to be really good at creating newsletters that nobody wants. Uh like we don't want to have to be this newsletter, but here we are.

Um but having this newsletter allowed us to stay in touch with people and to reinforce the messaging and share the absolutely ridiculous amounts of content. When you look at the Warrior website, the and what the various teams, Adrian and the OCS newsletter, um, the the data teams, the the OCS Conclave team, there are probably I would say 40 or 50 pages of content here. This is all stuff that was fan-led, fan-created. Uh fans operate the website and and post content. I believe this is, I think it's on Squarespace, which has been a nightmare.

Um, but there's some of the the individual data pieces. There's so much content. And then internally, there's also an outreach team, which is essentially a built-in PR agency of people when a new piece of content goes up, um, it's pitched out on social media, but then they reach out to reporters, depending on the type of reporter and the type of content to say, hey, go check this thing out. And even though not, you know, not thousands, but even though these reporters did um did not cover us as much as we wanted during the campaign, we know we held their attention because when you look at what happened after the campaign was uh saved, uh in terms of media coverage. Let's see, uh, where's the media coverage short?

Here we are. Um at can't just after cancellation, we saw you know, a couple hundred key articles. Uh this is the billboard launch, 170 key articles were the articles about the campaign. When the show was announced to save, that's what happened in the mainstream media. Is it just dwarfed anything else?

And I'm firmly of the belief that had the campaign not constantly been beating on the door of these reporters and saying, hey, here's some new content to check out, this would not have happened. Hmm. What so I want to go back to the email uh newsletter for a second. You know, so Chris, you mentioned that it had really high engagement, and then your pandemic newsletter had really high engagement. One of the things that strikes me is that both of those newsletters were hyper focused on one single thing.

So when I think about the Trust Insights newsletter or your almost timely newsletter, that's not a one single focus. There's more of a generalist feel to it. So that to me is it says, you know, if we want to increase the engagement with our newsletter, we need to hyper focus on one thing that people are passionate about, or we can just sort of keep it as is and know that our numbers will never be as strong as something like a very niche topic. Part of it's emotional too, right? When you listen to like Kelsey and Laura and stuff, this is a a campaign that people were very, very angry about.

I mean, if you had seen some of Laura's tweets and some of Lucy's tweets along the way, like Lucy was at one point sending tweets for like, you know, that could get you arrested. Uh maybe don't do that. Um, and the pandemic newsletter was powered fuel fueled entirely by fear, right? Uh that was three years of people going, what the hell's going on? What should I be doing about this?

I don't those are very, very strongly rooted emotional marketing angles. And I think it would be difficult to do that on a stained basis, you know, about multiple topics. So it is not just the generalist, but it's also the emotion part. If we made a here's what you should be afraid of in AI newsletter, I'm sure it would do very well. I can be scary.

Yes, you can I can be I can be super scary, but like, yeah, you're right. To keep it up is exhausting. Yes. Um, so how big did this get? You know, it sounds like you had a lot of people doing a lot of different jobs, a lot of different functions.

How big was the team? Were you basically running an organization, but everybody was a volunteer? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. 100%.

I think at the peak, uh in the beginning, there's probably about 40 of us, maybe. Um, and then over time, people obviously, you know, life happens, people drop off, situations occur. So I think now we're maybe at 35 of us, but everybody is a volunteer, no one's getting paid uh this was um you know i can only speak like on on my and sarah's part but uh when we were like you know really pushing the billboards in the beginning you know we were working our full-time jobs and then doing this immediately after work uh during our lunch breaks going to sleep at four o'clock in the morning and then waking up at seven eight o'clock in the morning so we could usually talk before going into work and then kind of rinse and repeating that for months and months and months so uh and we tallied the hours too of every team and it's insane but it worked and all of us were really happy because like Chris said it's if it's something that one you have an emotional attachment to but two if um and this is just something I believe in but I think if you put a lot of value into your team you put a lot of communication in because you're you're regardless of what company you're working at and wherever you are you're going to have a variety of personalities but putting stock into those personalities to understand them. I mean me and Chris have had really long conversations um and our personality is meshed in a lot of ways and then other ways we're we're a little bit different but in that way like we work amazingly together and that goes for the whole order discord. So I think if companies were to take into that factor uh work cohesively with their units that they have and then you can gain that emotional response to everything that you do within your company, whether it be a newsletter or whether it be um whatever your sales point is.

Um I think it just more so sometimes we forget about that that everything in life is a domino effect. So how do we want to use that domino effect? Um and within the order, it was a beautiful domino effect. Yes, there were some trials and tribulations, but a bunch of volunteers got together, learned a variety of things, and we work amazingly together to this day. Yeah.

Well, I know who I'm gonna have stand in for me when I go on vacation, Kelsey. I'll be calling you later. I mean, one thing that's one thing that sets the order apart from like a company, even though it looks like a company when you look at our server, is there's no like everything is one goal and one goal only. Like in a company, each department still has its own goals aside from like the okay art of the company itself, um, or there's ego within a team. Um, and almost like teams are competing for resources or angling for promotions or something like that.

And with all that stripped away, it's really easy to just focus on the single goal. Um, most of the decisions were made together. Um, some people were obviously way better than others at certain topics, and so no one would really lean into that decision. But I mean, ultimately all of us were involved, which is absolutely impossible in a company. There's just no way for that to ever happen.

Um, but it was pretty cool to watch. And then just knowing that there were other servers too that had their own initiatives, it was like here was the one we were running, but there were multiple other servers that were running like right alongside us. Um, it's just crazy the number of people that were um working all together and like an organized state. So it's yeah. It's it's definitely a rarity.

I mean, you're describing decision by committee, and that is next to impossible in a company. I used to manage a steering committee of a bunch of you know, old academic white men, and my job was to get them all dozen of them to come to one singular decision once a month. And it it consumed all of my time, and it was nearly impossible. And so, you know, I love hearing that this group, the order, was able to set aside ego and say, we have this mission, we have this one goal, so let's just stay focused on that. And I really wish that, you know, I hope companies and others learned from what you were able to accomplish by staying focused on what was important and putting aside your ego, Christopher.

I'm just kidding, Chris isn't like that. Sometimes in fairness, and this is I I think this is an important point. Um, as much as it's not a good idea to stereotype by things like gender, um the fact that you know trust insights is a women-led organization, right? The fact that the order is I'm literally the only person who identifies as uh a cisgender male in the entirety, I think of the fandom, but but certainly of the order. Um it's not a coincidence.

It's not a coincidence that that folks were able to to stay focused on the objective. And to what Laura's saying, you know, there's there was not a lot of other conflict. There was some, you know, one person picked a coma, you know, whatever. Um as one does, as one does. But beyond that.

Um in general, it was that collaborative uh organization that is super super rare because most of the time there are egos involved, and most of the time, unfortunately, that tends to be associated with you know one gender versus the other. And I would love to explore that topic perhaps on a different show because there's a lot of parallels to other things that are happening in the world where you could say, Oh, I see that playing out, but again, in the interest of staying focused, because I don't disagree with you. I think it is such a rare thing. Um unfortunately it's a rare thing where you have a 99% identifying women led team where things can get done. But I think that there's definitely something that other teams and other organizations can learn from that of like, oh, if we just let certain people on our team have more of a voice, hey, what else could we accomplish?

Um with that, I guess one of the big questions I have is how many people have reached out to each of you to say, so there's this other show that I would love for you to go ahead and save. So can you just get on that? Uh so many. So as soon as uh the renewal announcement came out, um, we had I mean, a lot of us in the server, we had people in our Twitter DMs messaging us on Discord, um Instagram as well, hopping on like the TikTok videos and leaving comments. And I mean, we've offered resources to them, you know.

I I believe uh Chris, you know, basically put together like a breakdown of kind of what the power that they harness, like they have, what they want to look for, what they want to do, how to go about doing that. Unfortunately, on the Twitter side, because that's just a ticking time bomb at this time. Um, that's you know that's gonna be harder to pull for them. But um, you know, we've had people, I've had people go into my inbox and Sarah's DMs and ask about cost of billboards and what companies we looked into and what are the legalities of everything? Um, because that was another thing that we had to go through was could this have a likeness of a character?

What is the verbiage that we wanted to put on the billboard? Would we get in trouble for this? You know, so on and so forth. So nothing about it was an overnight process. Um and trying to pass on that message to a lot of people, it really depends on their team.

And the at the end of the day, I think the advice that all of us have given is find a good team, put together a good team. And if you know anybody else with the other Discord servers, all of you get together, work together, have conversations. Um, because even with our team, when we held Twitter spaces, we would have teams from Sapphics and Pain and other Discord servers come into our space and promote whatever they were doing, right? So we were working again as a cohesive unit. And at the end of the day, I think that is really kind of what set us apart.

So now there is a movement of fandoms united where everyone's kind of bouncing off of each other, helping each other, signing each other's petitions, offering advice, so on and so forth. One of the things I think is really important for companies to think about is when it's appropriate to do so. And then that's a whole separate discussion, but when it's appropriate to do so to participate in one of these campaigns, you will see typically very unusual outsized results. Now I'll give you a very quick example. So Outfront Media is the billboard company that uh the Los Angeles Billboard was this New York also out front.

Uh no, that was a different company. Yeah. So uh the Los Angeles Billboard was was out front. When you look at their YouTube channel, right? They they put up a video about the the billboard, and then you look at all the other videos on the channel, like 34 views, 23 views, 17 views, 3,800 views, right?

The the passion and the energy of a fan movement, if you can align with it in a way that is usually beneficial, can substantially impact your marketing positively, right? So it's one of those things where if it makes sense, if it's on brand, um and and it's it's not just outright taking advantage of people, it can work really well. Uh the the uh regional convenience store uh chain sheets uh were huge fans of the show. Uh Kelsey or Laura, you want to talk about what happened with that? Because that's a funny story in and of itself.

Go ahead, Laura. Follow you. Sure. Yeah, so I can't remember who it was that engaged them first, honestly. Um, but they tweeted uh something in support of the show, I believe.

Um by the way, anyone who ever tweeted anything about Warrior None, we like piled into their uh comments, their replies, which which worked. We got some engagement, but anyways, with Sheets, their social media team just we both just like thrived off of each other. So we were in their replies. Um they engaged with us to a pretty decent level. Um, they sent out some t-shirts uh that were customized, it has their logo.

I have one in the closet, and then it has hashtag warrior none on the back and a halo on it. Um but yeah, I feel like to this day, we're in their replies on they're like talking about fries, and we're in there with our gifts, our warrior nun gifts, and the social media teams engaging with us. So it was great to see. Leah said it was a cohosh that quote treated uh one of the Sheets's uh tweets originally. So that was uh weird that began.

Yeah. I mean, I'm not mad to be associated with French fries, so I think like that's a pretty good win. Same, same. Yeah, I've been trying to get a coupon. So Well, if you're listening, send it over.

Send it. Um so couple couple final questions because we are running up on time. How excited were you when you found out that the show had been saved? Like, how did you find out what was the first thing you did? You know, how did you disseminate the information, or was it just something that everybody found out at the same time?

We all found out at the same time. Yeah, Simon Barry, who is the showrunner, posted on Twitter. Um I don't even think I saw I I think it might have been Lara who to like messaged me and told me I was like, what? So I went on Twitter and I was like, oh god. So yeah, there was yeah, there was this one a couple was it a couple days before, or was it like the day before?

I can't remember. So the importance of the sunrise is when the show was canceled. Um, it was a picture of a sunset, which has traumatized the fandom from here on out. Yes. Um can't look at sunsets the same.

We can't look at sunsets, it's just cruel to post a sunset in the phantom. Um, but no now uh as a tease, he posted the sunrise. Um, so some of the trauma lifted a little bit of healing there, and then this was the official announcement from him, and I mean it just it obviously blew up the engagement on there like insane. Um so the whole fandom found found out at once, and then of course our Discord server just lost lost it. Um I mean that's super exciting.

I mean to put that much work, he said you tallied up the hours. Can you give me a rough, very rough estimate of the number of total hours that went into this? I believe it was 14,000 hours tallying at at standard agency bill rates of 2.8 million dollars. Oh, so no big deal. No, so anyone can just recreate this.

Absolutely. Easy. Um, and then I guess my other question is what's next. So, Laura, what's next for you? What's your next passion project?

I mean, I feel like we we're still waiting on some more news. Uh, there's a countdown right now, so we're trying to still like stay engaged with the fandom at this point. And next passion project, I need a break. Oh my gosh, this has been insane. It's like this is the only job I've been okay being on call for because people can tag you and stuff at like any hour, and I always feel compelled to respond.

But no, I just need to I just need a break. Got it. So you're gonna take a nap. Yeah, uh, Kelsey. What is next for you?

Yeah, a small coma. Um just a wee little coma. Just a little bit. We'll call a pad. Um, yeah, I think I think I'm definitely on par with Laura.

Uh we're still working on this, you know, it's um we're still trying to reach engagement and keep up that community too. Um I had a conversation with Christopher recently about this, you know, about how it wasn't only saving the show, but this kind of especially post COVID, um, a lot of people identify differently. A lot of people, you know, even myself, I used to be a massive extrovert. I would be singing karaoke at a bar. Now probably never gonna happen again.

Um, so my community is more so like, you know, you want to come hang out in my backyard. If not, let's hang out online and trying to give that community a home. So that's kind of my focus right now, as well as branching out my career and changing my career, changing my career entirely. Um, but I mean, after this, probably just I I definitely need some sort of break, and uh I will be traveling while Laura's taking a small coma. So and Chris, what's next for you?

What don't I know? We're gonna take over the world. Um that you you that that you do know. Um no, it's the the focus, you know, for me personally, is now that I have more free time, um, really digging into the things that have been happening very recently in the AI space that have been mind melting uh in terms of you know what what the tools are growing to be more and more capable of. Um keeping an eye on on on all the the crazy stuff and with the campaign itself, the campaign is over.

Um the community lives on, and so still staying connected with folks and things because there is more, there is more to happen. Um obviously this the series now that's been renewed, is i it's gonna take some time to uh to to actually be to be made because uh as I believe as of this morning, SAG After just went on strike. Um I don't I don't see if that's official yet or not, but the Writers Guild has been on strike. So basically all of Hollywood shutting down for uh who knows how long, probably months. And so part of part of helping keep a community nurtured is identifying the content creators within it and helping share their work.

Um, because that's the only new content you'll get for for a while. So people who writing fan fiction and creating these video edits and stuff. So the the same tools that you can use to run a campaign are also the tools that you use to keep a community fed. You know, when we look at the analytics for marketers uh Slack group that we run, that is we we feed that community with content constantly. We just put uh uh an exclusive download in there yesterday for how do you choose which large language model to use based on on your needs.

And so uh the other thing that for me is taking all the stuff we wrote over a hundred pieces of code for this project, um, it's spanning like 15 or 16 different services. So it now is going through that inventorying it and saying, okay, well, what stuff can we reuse now for you know, one piece of uh software uh you and I just reused, uh you didn't know it, um, for one of our clients. Uh it was one of the language processing pieces of software is now in use with the client. So it's now taking all these things that we did and how do we now productize that and bring it to market? So that's kind of what's next on on my end.

And if you want Chris to come to your agency and talk about large learning models or artificial intelligence or any of these things, you can hit us up at trustinsights.ai slash contact where you will get hold of John, who, as we mentioned, is currently out hunting unicorns, but he is also our chief statistician. Um he is the only one of us who passed stats in college. Um so that's a little fun fact. Thanks for having me. We've outed ourselves multiple times, Chris.

This is not new information. So Laura Kelsey, thank you for joining us. I can't wait to see see what's next and how this all plays out. Do you have any final thoughts for us today? No, just to be anything.

Thanks for your time. I appreciate it. And um, if John finds those unicorns, I would like one. I'll take one. I we'll pass on the message to him.

Thank you. Be careful that they will like you stab you through the skull with their horn and then eat your heart. Or you know, they're like they're like horses and they'll kick you and bite you. Dark turn. And that's when we know that the show is over.

Thanks for tuning in, folks, and we will see you all next time. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast. At our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter.

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