Objectives

The premiere of Yellowstone Season 3 shattered ratings records by becoming cable’s most watched original telecast of the year with 9.3 million viewers. And our devoted fans are a huge part of that record-breaking success. Our objectives on Instagram are to regularly engage with our fans to help deepen their fandom so that they can advocate for the show and share it with non-viewers and continue to grow the audience on a season-over-season basis. To celebrate Halloween 2020, we sought to engage our audience by sharing fan-made Yellowstone Halloween costumes. We did a similar execution in 2019, and wanted to make 2020 even bigger and better. 

Strategy and Execution

The weekend before Halloween, we posted a call out asking for fans to send us their best Halloween 2020 looks. We instantly received positive feedback, and were DMd hundreds of entries. Beginning on Saturday October 31 and continuing through November 1, we posted a 112-slide Instagram story featuring the wide variety of looks and characters. Many of the fans submitted Rip and Beth looks, which is in line with content that we know performs well, as they are a fan-favorite couple. 

Results

• The Halloween 112-frame story drove an incredible 8.2M views, topping the prior year by nearly 3x. Even further, part 1 and part 2 topped the impression per frame story average by +30% and +5% respectively. Part 1 also generated an impressive retention of 87%, +8pp vs. the average. (Especially impressive considering part 1 spanned 60 frames.) Last but not least, both part 1 and part 2 drove a low average drop off rate of -1%, 3pp lower vs. the average. 
• The Halloween story also led to Yellowstone’s strongest week for Instagram story views ever with 8.4M total earned last week. 
• Even further, fan growth was especially strong with 9.7k new fans added. This marks the strongest week for fan growth since the week of 9/14!

Media