This past weekend, Mad Men returned to AMC for the final stretch of its seven season run. Across both traditional and digital advertising channels, AMC championed the midseason return with the tagline “The End of an Era,” including a nostalgia-fueled content play across billboards, and even an exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image.
On social media, the network pushed hashtags like #TheFinalEpisodes and #TheEndOfAnEra to build hype around the holiday weekend premiere. One campaign included a 12 Days of Christmas-style countdown to the premiere featuring iconic staples from the series — lipstick, old fashioneds, etc — a strategy which performed better on some channels than others.
On Facebook and Twitter, for example, the countdown content saw above-average engagement. In share links from the TrackMaven platform below, he number in the top right shows the engagement level for each post (i.e. how many more interactions each post garnered compared with AMC’s average post).
The final countdown image, for example, saw 20 times more retweets than the average tweet from AMC’s Mad Men profile.
But in contrast to the success of the countdown campaign on major channels like Twitter and Facebook, the same content crashed and burned on Tumblr.
The engagement levels for the Tumblr posts below are all “in the red” — meaning they under-performed compared to the average engagement for a post on the Mad Men Tumblr page.
On Tumblr, the Mad Men countdown content completely flopped, with each post reaping far below the page’s average engagement. So what does work for Mad Men on Tumblr?
If the content marketing team at AMC had been using leading metrics, they could have seen that video teasers — like this compilation of the number of punches thrown, cigarettes smoked, and drinks poured in the office over the course of the show’s seven seasons — performed exceptionally well on their Tumblr page.
The video below saw 2,800 interactions, nearly 3 times as many notes as Mad Men‘s average Tumblr post.
And the teaser trailer for the final episodes (below) also reaped a whopping 7,500 interactions on Tumblr, 8 times more than the brand’s average.
Rather than broadcasting the same content across multiple channels, could a channel-specific content strategy have stoked the #EndOfAnEra buzz to greater heights? Perhaps! According to Nielsen, however, the midseason premiere remained on equal footing in comparison with last year’s with 2.3 million same-day viewers.
Stay tuned to see how AMC’s Mad Men marketing compares to HBO’s Game of Thrones season premiere! Subscribe to our newsletter below!