In the world today, there's pressure to have easy, quick answers to questions. But issues and people are complex; there are no easy answers. To promote The Atlantic's belief in the importance of questioning your beliefs, our campaign idea was to have notable personalities ask themselves a tough personal question, and then debate multiple sides of it with multiple versions of themselves. In this launch film, Michael K. Williams (an American actor born in a Brooklyn ghetto), debates the reasons behind why he’s been frequently cast as a gangster - reasons that range from his personal decisions to the influence of society on his identity.

The full-length film ran on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and TheAtlantic.com. We also ran shorter cutdowns of the film on the same platforms and then retargeted those viewers with the full-length version. Finally, we created “question cards” that acted as conversation starters to support the broader platform of Question Answers, to help start the difficult process of questioning your own long-held beliefs and assumptions. These live on theatlantic.com/questionanswers and in social.

The video has been viewed over 12 million times across all platforms with only $50,000 in paid media support. It inspired over 150,000 shares and 30,000 comments on Facebook, and over 9,000 mentions on Twitter (with no paid media at all). Sentiment was overwhelmingly positive, with 98% likes to dislikes on YouTube. We also got the right people talking - the majority of engagement came from users 18-34 who worked in media or the arts, and they were highly influential in their communities (the top 50 people who mentioned the campaign had an average of 250,000 followers on Twitter).