Case Study: How Mirzapur series increased excitement around its season 2 announcement

• Amazon Prime Video's Mirzapur is the most spoken about and the most-watched show on its platform.
• To build some hype around the release date of season 2, Amazon Prime decided to leverage the show's fandom and create a micro campaign for the announcement.
• Here is how the campaign was executed and how Amazon Prime created a buzz around Mirzapur 2 on social media.

Amazon Prime Video’s Mirzapur is the most spoken about and the most-watched show in India. Since the launch of season in 2018, the fans have been asking for Season 2 of Mirzapur on all possible platforms through an acronym created by Prime Video, #MS2W, which stood for Mirzapur Season 2 When?

Amazon Prime Video leveraged its show fandom and created a micro campaign to announce the release date.

Objective:

The objective of this activity was to harp on the fandom of the show to announce the season 2 date and gratify the fans for their support by announcing the S2 Release Date.

Creative Idea:

After a viewer finishes watching the first part of a series, they take to social media to check when the next season is launching. The thought lingers for a few more days and they move on. However, with Mirzapur, the fandom was on another level. They religiously asked for Season 2 in the comments of almost all posts for two years.

To honour their love for Mirzapur, Amazon Prime Video did a micro campaign appreciating their fandom and sharing season two’s release date. The idea was to design the campaign by the fans, for the fans, to the fans.

Challenges:

Due to the time-gap between the 2 seasons, Amazon Prime Video had to make sure that they evoke the right feelings and got the fans excited about Season 2’s date announcement without fueling their frustration or anger for making them wait for S2 for 2 years. So they decided to launch a 4-day micro campaign.

Execution:

To announce the Release Date of Mirzapur Season 2, Amazon Prime Video initiated a 4-Day micro-campaign (starting 08/21) on social media with a Video paying ode to the Fandom shown for Mirzapur since S1 launch. This video evoked all the right feelings in the fans & they were quick to continue their ask for #MS2W.


To amplify the conversations around the hashtag, Amazon Prime Video pushed fans to ask #MS2W one last time through a Facebook Event Page and collated and shared some of the best responses on Amazon Prime Video and Mirzapur Handles.

A day before releasing the Announcement Date, it asked the audience to join the YouTube Premier scheduled for August 24 at noon to find out the date through Amazon Original Crossover videos (PL, BB, TFM, HD, BITS, 4MSP & PY) asking for Season 2’s release Date. On the day of the announcement, Amazon Prime Video premiered the announcement video on its YouTube.


Results: Quantitative & Qualitative

The Date Announcement video premiered on Prime Video India’s Youtube Channel & 104K+ people saw the premiere together on 08/24 at 12 PM.

Within an hour of announcing the Season 2 Release Date, #Mirzapur2 started trending on Twitter and peaked at position 2.

This was Amazon Prime Video’s first-ever micro-campaign that has led to 3 videos to be trending simultaneously on Youtube (Release Date Announcement, Fandom, Mirzapur X Paatal Lok).

Mirzapur 2 Date Announcement Video (With 5.8M+ views) is trending on #1 since 08/24.

An Ode To Fandom of Mirzapur video (With 4.4M+ Views) trended at #2 on YouTube on 08/22.

A Hype Mashup video of Mirzapur X PatalLok (with 1.4M views) trended on #12 on 08/24.

Details about the industry – size, projections, etc

Amazon Prime Video is an Internet Video-On-Demand Service Provider and falls under the segment of Video Streaming (SVoD). Revenue in the Video-on-Demand segment in India amounts to US$166m in 2018. Revenue is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2018-2023) of 5.7%, resulting in a market volume of US$219m by 2023. The market’s largest segment is Video Streaming (SVoD) with a market volume of US$107m in 2018.

Brand information:

Produced by Excel Movies, comprising of a stellar cast like Pankaj Tripathi, Ali Fazal, Vikrant Massey, Divyendu Sharma Shweta Tripathi, Shriya Pilgaonkar, Harshita Gaur, Rasika Dugal, and others, Mirzapur is an Indian crime thriller web series.

All episodes of the show were released on November 16, 2018 and the 1st Episode was exclusively available for free in order to attract Non-Prime Viewers.