How do you do justice to a television series that blends the waking and dreaming worlds, when, unlike Neil Gaiman, you’re bound by the laws of reality?

That’s the challenge we faced when Netflix asked us to help them promote the launch of Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” in Latin America, a series which sees the ‘waking’ world thrown into chaos when The Sandman is captured and his power over our dreams is abused.

We didn’t just want our audience to watch the show, we wanted them to dream about it too. But since none of our team had mind-bending powers, we had to find a way of using technology to make this possible.

Would our audience be happy with a simple video trailer? No, we didn’t think so either.

Research told us that our interactions before we fall asleep can influence the way we dream. So, we decided to give bedtime a 21st century makeover.

First, we used Artificial Intelligence to compose eleven relaxing lullabies and meditative videos based on the scripts and visuals from all episodes of the series.

Then, we brought The Sandman to life as an Alexa Skill and encouraged people to talk to him before going to bed.

By running their conversations through sentiment analysis software, The Sandman could choose the best lullaby to play to them based on their current mood: helping them drift off peacefully into the dreaming world…

The technical approach involved several components of natural language processing (NLP), sentiment analysis, and AI-generated music.

We developed the conversational interaction between the user and Alexa, which involved designing and implementing a voice user interface (VUI) that could understand and respond to user inputs.

We used NLP techniques to recognise and parse user utterances, such as asking for a lullaby or providing information about their previous dreams.

We also incorporated dialogue management to ensure a natural flow of conversation and to provide appropriate prompts or responses based on the user's input.

To determine the user's mood and sentiment, we applied sentiment analysis algorithms to analyze their previous dreams and the content of their conversation with Alexa. Based on this analysis we provided a sentiment appropriate AI-generated lullaby which was composed using the Sandman episode scripts as input for the AI.

Overall, the project required a combination of technical skills and expertise in AI, NLP, and music composition to create a seamless and engaging user experience.

Our innovative approach to the brief gave The Sandman’s audience a unique and highly personal way of interacting with the show while generating significant media coverage.

The first ever TV series to engage its fans while they were asleep delivering 60,000 nights of blissful dreaming

As other content providers fought for attention in the waking world, we helped Netflix to leapfrog them all by taking our message into the dreaming world.

Our approach to the brief gave The Sandman’s audience a unique and highly personal way of interacting with the show while generating significant media coverage.

The Netflix Sandman skill usage from 5 August to 1 September, 2022, available only in Latin America (with the main focus being Mexico), obtained the following results in less than a month:

- 20,839 unique customers opened the skill.

- The total number of sessions from was 58,113.

- The peak number of sessions was on 27 August with 4,575 successful sessions registered.

- Unique Customers trend has remained steady each week - around 6,000 per week.

- On average, each customer opened the skill twice.

- The first three days after the launch we had a peak of each user opening the skill 2.28 times.

The first ever TV series to engage its fans while they were asleep delivering 60,000 nights of blissful dreaming.