Mike Birchall and WEBTOON's Everything is Fine is a gripping, daylight-thriller webcomic about a suburban utopia of impossibly cheerful inhabitants in giant Hello Kitty-esque mascot heads. Maggie and Sam are your typical married couple living on a tidy street in a pleasant neighborhood. Except, their dog has been dead on the floor for weeks, the man next door keeps hoarding tinfoil, and they dutifully poison their trash before taking it out each week. Oh, and there are cameras everywhere.

We ran two mass advertising campaigns to promote Everything is Fine’s first season in 2021, and its return in 2022. Together, the campaigns catapulted an obscure, unlikely hit to a multi-million-reader digital comic powerhouse.

Season 2 Growth Campaign

As Season 2 of Everything is Fine drew nearer, we wanted to leverage the series to get non comics-reader Gen-Z to try reading WEBTOON’s content and also reengage season one readers.

The no-context, subliminal video creative approach in season one’s campaign (see below) had been a major success. In order to top our previous campaign we came up with the idea of tapping into the extreme surveillance state in which Everything is Fine’s cartoon cats are trapped. This was based on the insight that Americans feel more watched than ever. — everyone’s living in a world with voice assistants listening, apps that track your movement, and viral videos documenting your worst moments.

For the execution, we called on our friends at Golden Wolf again to help bring to life a two-part series of animations featuring characters caught on camera defying their unseen Big Brother-esque watchers. Each episode was paired with a “censored” version, as if the footage was edited to erase the incident. Gen-Z viewers were shown both versions in sequence as a “made ya look” shared experience. Our team also orchestrated a stunt in NYC featuring actors in cat heads warning passers-by about surveillance to pique IRL curiosity. Finally, we created a cat-head TikTok AR filter and seeded it to mega-influencers to spread buzz.

The results were overwhelming. The campaign garnered 35M+ video views and 1.5M engagements on TikTok, performing at 300x the TikTok video CTR benchmark, with a 4.7% recommendation lift on that platform. Readership for Everything is Fine grew +1045% and increased traffic to WEBTOON +139% year-over-year. The campaign was a 2023 Webby Award Honoree.

Campaign Recap:

Uncensored and Censored TikTok Video Campaign

Season One Growth Campaign

WEBTOON knew it had a mega hit on its hands when MikeB’s mysterious, trippy, dystopian comic, Everything is Fine premiered in 2021. We took a two-part sequenced campaign strategy to drive readership. Phase 1: Create cryptic, subliminal, and un-skippable spoofs of popular digital and social ads to drive buzz. Phase 2: Follow the subliminal ads with no-context mini episodes of some of the first season’s key moments. The result was an 8000% increase in Google search volume for “everything is fine ad,” and over a million weekly readers for the series. We knew our friends at Golden Wolf would give this campaign just the right creepy touch and they delivered.

Phase 1: Subliminal Ads

(YouTube versions only)

Phase 2: Mini Episodes

(YouTube versions only)