Netflix asked us to warm the Stranger Things community up for the season 3 release by pulling the nostalgia trigger that their fans love so much. To do this, they asked us to come up with a major pre-launch stunt.

We created an app (available on both Google Play and the App Store) that works the same way TVs worked in Brazil in the 80s. To unveil unreleased scenes from the next ST3 season, fans had to put a steel wool pad near their phones, mimicking what all Brazilians did back then. The app was the only place on the entire web where you could sneak a peek at ST3 scenes, but to do so, they had to use something as analogical as steel wool.

By combining feelings of nostalgia with the simple use of a cellular phone, which is something quite trivial in the lives of our target audience, we were able to create powerful media in the shape of a companion app for a community that was thirsty for new content.

Inside almost all smart phones there is a little sensor called magnetometer. It is able to measure magnetic fields. So, metallic objects like steel wool can have their presence detected by this cell phone component. It's practical application is to make the phone's built-in compass work properly.

In our case, we used variations in this signal intensity to make our app’s video player works similarly to an old television – with static noise that could be manipulated by getting a steel wool pad close to the back of the phone. Users could move it a little bit until find the sweet spot where the broadcast would be crystal clear.

We launched Stranger Antenna four days prior to the season debut and every day people could tune in to different exclusive Brazilian memorabilia content, wrapping in scenes from the third season that had never been released anywhere.

In less than a week, Stranger Antenna became the most downloaded app on Google Play Brasil, the second most downloaded app from the Brazilian APP Store and triggered two whole days on Twitter's Trending Topics. Going against all expectations of a content campaign it maintained the audience captive, watching our content for an average of 5 minutes and 20 seconds every day during the week the campaign lasted. Twitter Brasil considered Stranger Antenna the campaign with the highest engagement on its platform in 2019 and even steel wool brands benefitted indirectly, with a 17% increase in sales during the campaign.