In lead-up to the Season 4 premiere of Yellowstone, the Paramount Network marketing team was tasked with developing an innovative, non-traditional marketing campaign to generate excitement and awareness of the new season. Despite fan fatigue of virtual ‘events’, Paramount Network broke through the clutter with something new and buzzy: a nationwide, ‘Finding Yellowstone’ scavenger hunt.

The first-of-its-kind experience for the network married large-scale installations, a coordinated social roll-out and a custom microsite into one cohesive campaign. This combination of social + IRL participation casted a wider net of targeted and organic fan participation for the activation throughout the flight.

Paramount Network’s Yellowstone capped a third season marked by big ratings growth with its largest audience ever, making it the most watched cable entertainment program of 2020.

As season 3 left off with a jaw dropping, who-done-it cliffhanger, fans were eager for the new season premiere. Paramount Network strategically leveraged the mystery from S3, fandom, and culture to generate excitement and awareness of the new season.

Objectives included:

- Create a social frenzy that drives cultural conversation and press headlines around the series

- Eventize the premiere and Sunday nights on Paramount Network, reinforcing network attribution

- Retain the S3 audience; build epic anticipation amongst Core and lapsed Yellowstone viewers

- Ignite the Growth audience leading into S4, by encouraging catch-up FOMO (fear of missing out)

For its fourth season premiere, the Paramount Network Brand Marketing & Events Team executed a campaign designed to leverage last season’s momentum and amplify existing social conversation around the show’s return through a nation-wide scavenger hunt with a tiered system of pay-offs designed to incentivize core and casual viewers.

In promotion of the highly anticipated season premiere, 6 Yellowstone installations (a mix of creative custom fabrications and pre-existing landmarks) were hidden in key markets across the United States. Every installation embodied and/or referenced key iconography from the show’s history. The Grand Prize included an all-expense paid flyaway to the Chief Joseph Ranch - the backdrop of the iconic Dutton Ranch from the show - in addition to hundreds of smaller exclusive Yellowstone prizes.

The campaign mechanics were designed primarily to appeal to Yellowstone’s core viewer base, who are active participants on Yellowstone’s social media platforms and deeply invested in the show’s lore and world building.

Additionally, the interactive, nation-wide execution of the campaign was designed to appeal to new or casual viewers who may not be familiar with the show or its return to air.

To engage Yellowstone’s core fanbase and peak interest among new potential viewers, we launched the Finding Yellowstone Scavenger Hunt: a large-scale, nation-wide scavenger hunt with a tiered system of pay-offs designed to appeal to our core and casual targets.

We fabricated 6 custom Yellowstone “landmark” installations that referenced key iconography from the show’s history and dropped them in 6 key markets across the U.S.

Over the course of 6 days leading up to premiere, the show released a series of clues from Yellowstone’s social media accounts to help fans guess the location of each of the hidden landmarks.

As fans flocked to unlock the location by guessing the answers to these clues, the exact location of the landmark was revealed at the end of each day.

Correct guesses qualified consumers to win exclusive prizes, with a grand prize that included an all-expense paid flyaway to the real-life Dutton Ranch.

With support across all Yellowstone official social handles on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, the scavenger hunt-specific social posts alone received nearly 300K social engagements. The social focused-campaign helped make Yellowstone S4 the #1 most social premiere of the year across cable dramas.

On linear television, the Yellowstone S4 premiere event scored a whopping 11 million total viewers on Live + Same Day, and 14.7 million total viewers in the Live + 3 Day window, making it the most watched telecast on cable since The Walking Dead in Feb 2018. With an impressive performance among P18-49/P25-54, Yellowstone became the #1 series of 2021 across all of television.