Snowfall is an FX original crime drama TV series. Set in 1983, it explores the birth of the crack cocaine epidemic and its far-reaching impact on American culture. 

The client objective for this campaign was to generate quick buzz and spark conversation around the launch of this unique series. To accomplish this, we decided our content needed to be interactive and dynamic.

Our solution was to create an interactive content destination on latimes.com, along with news coverage of the real-life crack cocaine epidemic pulled from the Los Angeles Times editorial archives.

Our high-visibility promotional campaign included multi-media elements consisting of a continuously scrolling, single-destination page easily accessible across all devices. The multi-media elements included a timeline, video, interactive map, and animations.

Visitors were directed to the content via a combination of native advertising on latimes.com, social media promotion on the Los Angeles Times Facebook page, and a targeted publisher cost-per-click campaign.

In addition, a home page takeover of latimes.com with a video wall and a fixed custom home page promotional barker ran on select days during the campaign to maximize impact. 

In all, users spent what amounted to 369 days and five hours engaged with the content over the nine days. The content enjoyed 259,875 page views.

The campaign content exceeded averages across nearly all key performance metrics:

• Pageviews by more than 30%.

• Average time spent by more than 46%.

• Scroll depth by more than 65%.

• Video completion rate by more than 90%.

• Call-to-action rate more than 2.5 times the average.

We published sponsored Facebook posts on the Los Angeles Times on behalf of Snowfall. The results of these Facebook Handshakes exceeded even the average editorial post, with nearly one in five page views to the content coming from the social promotion. By comparison, the editorial benchmark for clicks is 20,000 and the Snowfall content received 47,332. The editorial benchmark for social shares is 50; we received 1,645 shares.