Earlier this year, Hulu partnered with Dame D.O.L.L.A. (a.k.a. NBA superstar Damian Lillard) to create the world’s first diss track against cable. This banger, called “Hulu Doesn’t Just Have Live Sports,” featured bars like “Over 65 channels Hulu showing off/I wasn’t putting on ’til I turned cable off.”

Dame shared the music video with his millions of followers and put the song on his Spotify. And while the history of diss tracks is marked by back-and-forth battles, two months and more than 15,800,000 streams later, cable has yet to respond.

Hulu Sellouts, the world’s first honest influencer campaign, has always featured athletes like NBA superstar Damian Lillard saying, “Why am I in this sponsored post for Hulu? Money.” But by 2021, Hulu had a problem. The campaign’s catch phrase, “Hulu has live sports,” was becoming so ingrained in sports culture that it was drowning out everything else Hulu had to offer. Luckily, the beauty of this campaign construct is that sellouts will say whatever you’re paying them to say. And that’s how we got to this campaign’s artfully written handle: “Hulu doesn’t just have live sports.”

Hulu Sellouts has always tapped into an aspect of the sponsored athlete’s personality. In the campaign’s third iteration with Damian Lillard, we tapped into Dame’s critically acclaimed hip hop persona: Dame D.O.L.L.A., who is widely regarded as the best NBA rapper of all time. After we commissioned him to lay down a track, he came back with a banger that featured bars like “Over 65 channels Hulu showing off / I wasn’t putting on ’til I turned cable off.” It was the first time in history a diss track took down cable TV.

For over two years, the Hulu Sellouts campaign had been telling sports fans across America a simple message: Hulu has live sports. That line took a streaming brand with zero ties to sports and turned it into a staple of sports culture. But with a looming price hike and Hulu’s live TV service losing regional sports networks, we needed to let people know that Hulu + Live TV offers so much more than just live sports.

Our goal was to communicate all the other features of Hulu + Live TV, without sacrificing the established brand equity and meme-ability that we had developed over the past two years.

Most celeb shoots involve getting them to approve a script and show up to set on time. To pull this campaign off authentically, we had to start by getting Dame D.O.L.L.A. to write and produce an original song. Our expectations were blown away when we heard “Hulu Doesn’t Just Have Live Sports” for the first time. With the song in place, we shot a :30 TV spot, a music video, and social content.

From a rollout standpoint, Dame got his Instagram fans hyped up by teasing that he was releasing a new diss track. A few days later, he dropped the music video and added the song to his Spotify.

While the campaign is too new to have generated any business results, Dame D.O.L.L.A.’s song has already been streamed over 15,800,000 times—and counting.