The culture marketing flywheel.

At its core, the flywheel is composed of four basic components:

1. Spectacles: earned media moments that break through the feed to reach users.

2. Rabbit holes: long-form content that is accessed by users and feeds deep engagement.

3. Niche culture: an existing community or subset of our audience that is willing to lean in if motivated correctly.

4. Mainfeed culture: everyone else within your target audience that is passively consuming the news that makes it to their feed.

To understand how these components work together, it’s best to start with an example:

1. Spectacle: A video game reveals an announcement trailer at a gaming event. 

2. Niche culture: Dedicated fans of the studio quickly spot a small QR code hidden within the trailer.

3. Rabbit hole: To their delight, the QR code leads to additional content with exclusive easter eggs. 

4. Mainfeed culture: Fans enthusiastically bring their findings back to the broader community which is picked up by creators and press, creating FOMO and broader awareness.

5. The flywheel repeats itself: The game seeds additional content that builds on the existing easter eggs. New fans join the conversation and the flywheel grows.

The flywheel in practice. 

This example presents a simplistic way of understanding the framework. But to see it on a grander and more exciting scale, we’ve documented two of the campaigns we reverse engineered to build the framework. 

Marty Supreme. One of our favorite entertainment campaigns from last year, A24’s Marty Supreme uses the flywheel in a novel way by building a rabbit hole centered around its “leaked” Zoom call that becomes a call back for each successive spectacle. In a sense, there is only one rabbit hole that grows in depth over the course of the campaign. If you didn’t, now you know. 

Arcane. Here’s another example: Riot and Netflix’s Arcane presents a masterclass in transmedia marketing. Fans are bounced between the show, the game, the soundtrack, music videos, live performances, and esports tournaments in an increasingly thrilling campaign journey that leverages each respective medium to max effect.

Why it works.

The flywheel represents several key shifts in how entertainment and gaming marketers traditionally approach campaigns.

Audiences become collaborators. Where the old playbook struggled to find a place for audiences and creators, the flywheel gives them a defined role. Most critically, the flywheel takes the mantra of “create for someone, not everyone” by appealing to communities defined by engagement.

Moments are chained together to create combos. As in many games, big impact requires chaining together moves that have the right synergies. The old playbook relies on the groovelines of planning by milestones and channels. The flywheel instead takes the viewpoint of the audience and thinks about how different types of moments can work together to multiply their effect.

It mimics natural social-first behaviors. The flywheel began as an attempt to reverse engineer major cultural moments and describe behavior that felt intuitive to us as users. It takes the viewpoint that social is no longer a standalone channel but instead recognizes that all marketing must now think social-first. It adopts an unorthodox but overdue view of today’s social landscape: social is the primary distribution channel for culture, most social moments originate off-platform, and the most successful social content is long-form. We’re partial to MØRNING’s take on the landscape in their State of Social report. 

Using the flywheel.

At Huge, we’ve taken a structured approach to campaign planning using the flywheel.

1. Map niche cultures and opportunities. Participation from niche communities must be earned by understanding their needs and behaviors. This is directly inspired by Harvard marketing professor Douglas Holt’s framework for Cultural Strategy. At Huge, we’ve used our AI platform LIVE to conduct digital ethnography of gaming communities at scale using AI-enabled capabilities. 

2. Build a communications plan. We use worksheets like the below to integrate the flywheel into communications planning. Doing so allows us to map which assets or moments are already accounted for, whether they should be considered spectacles or rabbit holes, and what creative stills need to be accounted for to build a comprehensive campaign. 

3. Connect the flywheels. This is best accomplished as a collaboration between strategy, creative, media, and client-side marketing. Whiteboards and lunch are also recommended. Remember to approach this from the audience’s perspective: are you building an enticing campaign journey that will enthrall its recipients?

Commonly asked questions

We’ve preemptively addressed some of the common questions we’ve received while developing this framework internally and with our clients.

• Before you ask: it’s best treated as a flexible rather than rigid framework. Some of the best campaigns we’ve reverse engineered use the framework in creative and unexpected ways. The important part is that the four components are present. And that they’re thought of as a flywheel. We wouldn’t recommend treating this as a strict “steps 1-4+” process. Have fun with it instead.

• Can it be pre-planned or does it require real-time activation? We’ve seen evidence that it can be feasibly accomplished in either scenario. However, we would recommend an optimal middle ground of “always-ready” where a pre-planned roadmap exists, but marketers have the ongoing analytics, dedicated capacity, and available investment to tweak or pivot as the campaign unfolds.

• What if I don’t have AAA budgets or A-list celebrities? We won’t deny that both are enviable ingredients. But some of the best applications of this framework we’ve seen are done by indies and AA studios without massive budgets or existing brand equity.

• Who is this framework relevant for? As you can tell by many of our examples, we view entertainment (video gaming, film, music, TV and more) as a broader category that shares much of the same playbook. This is also relevant to any industry that has a conceivably engaged audience such as consumer technology, politics or sport.

Case studies by Erin LaBranche and Kyle Ackerman.