Humans has a rich and diverse marketing campaign that utilises a number of techniques not commonly associated with traditional marketing. Many of these adverts are diegetically situated, as in they exist in the world of the narrative of the TV show, and advertise (or active make warnings about) 'Synths', the synthetic humans that are pivotal to the narrative of Humans.
Additionally, it could (and should!) be argued the Humans' marketing campaign positions the audience in an augmented reality, one where it insists that diegetic aspects of the show are real. In this sense, it resembles Orson Welles's infamous War Of The Worlds hoax that freaked out a lot of American radio audiences, as well as the use of street maps and phone cameras in Pokémon Go (click here to check out a write-up I did on this 10000000 years ago).
If nothing else, these key words sum up the marketing campaign for Humans was:
Unconventional
Atypical
Controversial
Economically risky
Augmented reality
Diegetically situated
Task - Using the resources linked below, answer the following questions in a new blog post:
- What is the importance/ significance of new digital technology in marketing?
- How far was the marketing campaign successful in engaging a wide audience and why is this so important in the global age of TV?
- Explain why guerrilla marketing was an effective strategy for Channel 4 to use to promote the first series of Humans
- How does the marketing campaign support Baudrillard’s theory about hyper-reality?
- Write a “Perfect Paragraph” on one of the above question with examples from the marketing campaign