Kingdom is a popular Netflix Korean zombie series with a huge fandom in Thailand.

As fans eagerly awaited the release of a full new season of Kingdom the popular Korean zombie series, Netflix launched Kingdom: Ashin of the North, a special one-off episode that finally explains the origins of the zombie outbreak- the innocent looking Resurrection plant.

To launch it, we collaborated with two other brands to serve up a truly unexpected way to experience Kingdom- through taste.

We spoke directly to our fans through social and got the responses to amplify the launch.

Kingdom, as with many K-films and series, is popular in Thailand. The zombie movie genre is saturated, but Kingdom stands out because it weaves in history and political drama into the plot.

Netflix in Thailand is seen as a foreign entity, streaming foreign content that has no relevance to Thai audiences. The challenge with any marketing efforts is to find ways to plug into local popular culture. Additionally, Netflix only exists on our screen and mobile phones without any physical presence in Thailand.

We want to leverage partnering other popular local brands in Thailand to make something that can be part of Thailand's cultural zeitgeist and get our fans to start the right conversations.

We wanted to take the fandom to the next level. It’s not enough to watch how the Korean kingdom got infected via the Resurrection plant- we wanted fans to taste it themselves.

We partnered with two brands that could spread the Resurrection plant far and wide across the kingdom…of Bangkok. The brands were:

Fire Tiger- a popular Korean bubble tea brand with a massive reach. We worked with them to ‘infuse’ the Resurrection plant into a special drink called the ‘Resurrection Plant Bubble Tea’.

We even designed a collector’s cup with thermo material that turned Fire Tiger’s logo into a zombie tiger when cold liquid was poured in- an easter egg in itself as the zombies of Kingdom would only attack when it got cold.

Lineman- one of Thailand’s biggest delivery platforms came on board to help drive the promotion with their delivery fleet turning into zombies while delivering

Fans are hungry for more- Kingdom: Ashin of the North is not a full season, but a special one-off episode. We knew this would not be enough for fans, so to counter this, we needed to find ways to ‘extend the episode’ to keep fans happy.

Going local- We knew strategically it was important for us to partner with local brands with clout as we wanted to open Kingdom up to new audiences.

Watching it vs experiencing it- Kingdom fans have spent the last two seasons pouring over every gory detail and plotline. But they’ve never had a

chance to ‘experience’ Kingdom. We knew this would be a good opportunity to do this.

With the drink and the partnership, we got people to experience Kingdom as they never did before and to share that on social; creating intrigue about the special episode.

In the lead up to the launch, we built hype around the partnership with mysterious hints on our social channels that got fans excited. All three brands dropped hints and each responded to another.

Fire Tiger turned their iconic tiger logo across their social pages into a zombie tiger, another easter egg for the zombie tiger that featured in the film.

When we launched the bubble tea flavour, hordes of fans went on LineMan and ordered the drink. On launch day, Lineman enlisted the help of its delivery riders to dress as zombies to deliver the drinks,

We engaged key influencers to order and showcase the drink and the content they created helped fuel even more demand. Fire Tiger had to stop orders after just 3 hours because they couldn’t meet the demand!

We released an Instagram AR filter that simulated how you would ‘turn’ once drinking the bubble tea.

On the first day of the launch, Fire Tiger had close to 1,000 orders in 3 hours.

The limited edition cups sold out in less than a week.

News of the drink spread rapidly in Thailand and was covered by publications that included Thairath, Vogue Thailand, Elle, Sanook, Workpoint today and The Standard.

Several influencers, creators and celebrities created their own parody content.

Since launch, we saw a bevy of (unpaid) posts about the partnership from the likes of Aum Patchrapa (12.8M), Margie (8.2M), Gubgib (6.7M), Taew Natapohn (6.6M), May Fuangarom (5.8M), James Jirayu (5.7M), Ple Nakorn’s family (combined YT & IG = 4.47M), Bitoey R-Siam (2.9M), Ning Panita (2.8M), A Supachai (1.9M), Jack Fanchan (1.6M), DJ Matoom (1.5M), Noi Butsakorn (1.2M), Jeab Lalana (1.2M), James Ma (1.2M), Tata Young (1M).

The partnership resulted in over 5.7 million people reached with more than 24 million Thai Baht in PR value.