Our brief was to launch Season Two of Netflix’s Queer Eye in Australia with a local twist.

The show features The Fab Five, five experts of their own specialist area (grooming, food and wine, interiors, culture, and fashion) who give a local hero a makeover. It struck a chord with the public from the get-go and is widely praised for its emotional and positive energy.

Netflix needed a social idea that connected the unscripted show with a new audience while providing something for existing fans of the show.

We had to make an American show resonate with Australians by creating a campaign that promoted it in a way that hadn’t been done before.

There’s a small rural town in New South Wales, Australia, called Yass.

Coined by the cast in Season One, “Yassssssss Queen” is a phrase synonymous with Queer Eye.

We connected the two in a local activation for the most “extra” play on words ever.

We created a custom episode of Netflix’s Queer Eye - exclusively for Australian social. “Yass, Australia” took the cast - The Fab Five - to the town of Yass (or, “Yassss!”) for their most ambitious makeover yet.

The Fab Five flew over and filmed in Yass for a day. In a 20-minute edit, we delivered the tears, emotional gut-punches and joy that a regular 50-minute episode has. As a final flourish (and special teaser), the Mayor of Yass crowned The Fab Five as honorary Yass Queens.

Queer Eye Season One provided us with lots of social conversation. From social listening we learned the show had its own seriously quotable language - “Can you believe?”, “Strugs to func”, and “YAAASSSS, henny!” - that fans were incorporating into their conversations.

We developed an idea based on this dialogue and twinned it with a handily named town in New South Wales. We turned “Yass, Australia” into a locally relevant, headline-worthy social episode in its own right.

Once we had our town and our hero, we carefully planned out a content stream. We built our rollout strategy on the insight that there is never “enough Queer Eye” for the Australian audience (and beyond). We slated the YouTube release of our video for a week after the season launched as a bonus surprise for fans, and worked back from there to create a three-week phase of sustained speculation.

Our three-week timeline kicked off with a teaser video on Netflix Australia’s social channels. The cast announced they were coming to Australia to do a very special makeover but didn’t reveal any more details.

We placed two huge Easter Egg billboards on each side of Yass - welcoming and waving goodbye to roadtrippers from The Fab Five.

While shooting the content, the cast drove social reach from their own channels through sharing snippets of their visit on Instagram Stories without revealing their final makeover.

We then released yet another teaser moment on Twitter to satisfy public and press speculation: the official crowning of The Fab Five as the Yass Queens with the Mayor of Yass herself.

Finally, The Fab Five helped us get the PR machine working by sharing hints of their secret project, and one week later we dropped “Yass, Australia!” on YouTube and Facebook.

“Yass, Australia” trended on Google, YouTube and Twitter. The video was so successful it was added permanently to Netflix and made available to 139+ million subscribers.

Content across social media and press has been viewed over 22m times in total, driving 82.3m impressions and 550k engagements.

More importantly, it ignited a conversation about toxic masculinity in Australia and became part of a wider discussion about the new wave of quality queer TV in the national media.

Yass now positions itself as LGBTQIA friendly. In March 2019, Mayor Rowena Abbey spoke to ABC Radio Canberra: “People actually come to Australia and come specifically to go to the town of Yass.” Social science researcher Saan Ecker added that Yass’ exposure from our mini-episode made it a safer place for the young LGBTQIA community, turning it into a leading example of an accepting community.