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).

The content topic for the media vertical was ground breaking and the results and reactions show how resonating and thought provoking the work really was.

We wanted to marry a timeless truth about The Atlantic (their passion for overturning assumptions and questioning answers) with a powerful cultural trend among our target (primary: 25-40, high HHI, well-educated, secondary: media/advertising industry) - our world is no longer binary, we live in a “slash” culture. There is pressure to have easy, quick answers to big questions, but life is more complicated than that now. People move fluidly now through gender, religion, political affiliation - or choose not to identify with any at all. There are precious few media brands that currently represent this, or even understand it. The Atlantic has always fought against easy answers and quick assumptions - we just needed to remind people of how relevant this position was in today’s world.

For over 160 years, The Atlantic has been world-renowned for creating high-quality, well-researched, thought-provoking articles. But those stories had become more famous than the brand itself. In order to change this, we tapped into a truth in The Atlantic’s DNA: the unrelenting desire to challenge themselves and their readers to overturn assumptions, reexamine long-held truths and confront the status quo. The Atlantic wanted to convey that spirit of restlessness and reinvention through a campaign designed to promote the brand itself, and change perceptions of it from dated, stuffy and highbrow to culturally relevant and “awesome.” We established two objectives in order to achieve this: make a splash within the media industry, and create a meaningful platform that their target could identify with.