In August 2015 Netflix launched Narcos, a new show telling the true story of the rise of the cocaine highway. It tells the story of how Pablo Escobar, the famous narco-trafficker, built a real empire in Colombia in the 80’s.

Inspired by all the unbelievable true facts that are related to Pablo Escobar and his Medellin’s cartel, Biborg designed a highly contextualised digital campaign in order to be impactful and draw attention to the show.

Through a Digital Out Of Home campaign set up in metro stations, business centers and malls across France, Biborg targeted people's daily lives by making 35 contextualised comparisons on true facts between Pablo Escobar’s cartel and French topics.

Online, there were impactful ad units such as a Homepage Takeover, a YouTube Masthead Unit and a WeTransfer video skin in order to surprise users and entice them to be interested in the show. On YouTube, a Billboard Trueview was created, revealing more content about Pablo Escobar, enticing people’s curiosity and having them not skip the video. Key figures that mean something to French people were used, for example, the size of Escobar's property was compared to a football pitch along with the number of his employees to the population of a French city.

By playing with the first five seconds and by creating curiosity and associating the content with typical French themes, we adjusted ourselves to our audience and their habits while improving tremendously our performances. The results meet our expectations and justify our creative strategy which aims to develop advertising content that is specifically adapted to Youtube.

A Slideshare on Linkedin presenting the cocaine business during the Medellin’s cartel era was also created.

In total there were 35 different messages displayed in 118 DOOH locations in France. The view rate of the billboard trueview was 22%.

Find out more on : Think with Google, The Doubleclick Rich Media Gallery (YouTube Masthead, Homepage Takeover)