Power Rangers X Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Retrospective
I’ve always wanted to tell stories with TMNT since I was a kid. TMNT #1 was the first comic I remember buying, I guarantee it was a reprint, but now that book is lost to the sands of time.
ANYWAY… This project was boss. We got to take two great and storied properties, mash them together to come up with something great. I was responsible for strategy, creative and design on this project. Scope of work included the packaging, social media, and all the various sundry other graphical bits.
I can’t say enough good things about Mural. Super useful for remote brainstorming!
We started the project by brainstorming.
I brought together a core team, some super fans, and our licensors. We generated as many ideas as we possibly could, using a remote brainstorming tool called MURAL. It was a productive session, we generated over 120 ideas in under 2 hours.
I’ve come to believe that brainstorming is better remote, it allows everyone to contribute, not just the loudest voice in the room.
After brainstorming, I parsed the ideas into actionable items and created a game plan that allowed our brands to talk together on social media, while hitting the best timing for most social engagement across all platforms.
Would you believe that the best time to post on almost all social media is Wednesday / Thursday at noonish Eastern time?
I know, shocking right?
Our first post hit on May 23rd World Turtle Day…
Power Rangers shouted out TMNT and TMNT responded. Fans saw what was happening and started guessing what was coming. https://www.instagram.com/p/CPOAo19h-gG/ this first post generated over 16k likes.
We kept posting…
By dropping posts at the same time, using the same style across both companies social media platforms, we built a cohesive visual language and got eagle eyed fans, and fan sites talking about what was coming.
Fans were primed and ready for the reveal.
On the first week of August we revealed the collaboration.
Fans and collectors went crazy. We dropped a product every day for 4 days. Each day the fans sold out that day’s presale. Social interaction was sky high, our posts totaled over 80k likes on Hasbro owned IG pages. They were retweeted and reposted all over the internet.
Fan First Friday
On Friday, we were totally sold out of all available presale Items. We had successfully launched the #1 pre-order of all time for Power Rangers. The presale was so good that markets increased their forecasts, and we saw an impressively large incremental increase in sales.
This type of story based, COLLABORATIVE!, guerrilla(ish) marketing is tons of fun, can be executed for short money, and creates a big ROI.
©Hasbro, Viacom and etc…