Stranger Things is Netflix’s biggest series of all time, a true pop culture phenomenon around the world. But because Season 4 had been delayed for years due to the pandemic, fans were getting restless for it to start, and expectations were high. We were asked to create a campaign to meet fans expectations and raise awareness of the show for the mainstream audience. A campaign that portrayed the darkest season ever.

Since Stranger Things Season 4 was the show's darkest storyline yet, we put out an S.O.S. on behalf of the “nerds” of Hawkins, directly urging the biggest fans to help them.

We started by adding an extremely simple detail to the trailer that would be broadcast. The Netflix watermark logo blinked in and out in morse code: S.O.S. Brazilian nerds. Stranger things are happening. We need your help.

A few days later, we turned the total lunar eclipse in Brazil into a spotlight for the show. We created the music video parody "The Total Eclipse of Hawkins" and embedded in it a call-to-action for fans to get in on the act.

We challenged Brazilian nerds to reveal their strength in numbers on TikTok by showing their nerdiest traits. And to reward them, we created a set of Stranger-Things-inspired NFTs with sole ownership of the asset contained on a floppy disk.

Stranger Things has one of the biggest and most engaged fandoms, i.e. “nerds” - just like the “nerds” of the show. So we decided to turn their restlessness into our biggest asset. The campaign was designed to activate only the “nerdiest” of superfans, bringing them into the world of the show and to create enough conversation to spread the message to the mainstream public.

The SOS NERDS campaign was a major call for help, urging fans to support their favorite characters in the series' biggest battle ever.

Starting with a hidden message in morse code during the broadcast of one of Brazil’s most watched TV programs. Then, taking advantage of the lunar total eclipse that was coming, we turned this natural phenomenon into media through a music video parody called "Total Eclipse of Hawkins", with another message embedded within, calling all the “nerds” to step up on TikTok to reveal their nerdiest traits. The response was overwhelming, proving that fans not only got our message but immediately got to action.

So to finish our narrative we rewarded them with an NFT from 1986. An incredibly valuable prize with the exclusive rights to the season's most iconic and important scenes built in ASCII art.

The morse code trailer received 25M views, 666K interactions, and a fan even cracked it using a Python code.

The music video had 5.6M views and more than 370K interactions.

732K joined the TikTok Challenge and it had 1.2B video views, 39.6M impressions and 854K clicks on just the first day, as well as almost 7M interactions.

The NFTs from 1986 had 11K simultaneous users competing to win, 94% of it organic traffic and an average time spent on the site of over 5 minutes.

The response was so overwhelming that the idea made for, and aimed directly at, the nerdiest fans also caught the attention of the mainstream audience. Incredible levels of engagement started within the “nerd” community and even reached fan clubs around the world. And the news invaded all the main media channels.