Umbrella Academy
We turned a niche comic into a buzzy, global fandom. In deep collaboration with the comic creators, and show-runner, I developed the award-winning global marketing and social campaign for seasons 1 and 2 and built the visual brand architecture for the series. From original tracks created in partnership with Gerard Way, to one of Netflix's most engaged social communities, to breaking out the cast, to creating art that inspires thousands of pieces of fan art—this special series has been the project of a lifetime.
Collaborators: Ralph New York, Size Matters Agency, Liz Lang Productions, Netflix Marketing—especially Cinya Burton (co-marketing lead), PR, and Operations teams, Trailer Park, Caitlin Cronenberg, Marco Grob.
The series logo created in partnership with designer Matt Stevens.
S1 art establishing the black and white graphic language that will carry through every season's campaign. The vertical lines are both an homage to rain and the show's comic roots. Photography by Marco Grob.
From pre-launch to s3, our social strategy and content grew the Umbrella Academy social channels to over 4 million devoted followers.
We conceived of and created an original cover with Gerard Way of Hazy Shade of Winter for the s1 trailer. It drove outsized conversation and helped bring in music and entertainment press introducing the series to a broader audience than just the existing comic fanbase.
Character art helped establish the Hargreeves siblings and season one villains Hazel and Cha-Cha. We created collectible trading cards of this art, which dropped at New York Comic Con and were being sold and collected on eBay within hours.
Our out of home campaign sparked social posts from fans and talent all around the world.
Season two serves up the same weird family, but this time with new, weird problems...in a whole new timeline. The goal was to drive even more conversation than season one. We did it by super-serving the fans and having every beat of the campaign reveal something about season 2. Over the course of our season two campaign we gained 4.4M new followers and 379M impressions. Additionally, The Umbrella Academy was listed as one of the top searched for shows of 2020 by Google.
Even a global pandemic couldn't stop this cast and fandom from rocking out. We recreated the iconic season 1 dance number to "I Think We're Alone Now," by Tiffany, but this time, the cast, like the rest of the world, did it at home in quarantine as a way to surprise and delight fans with the s2 release date.
