Tweet as AXN India

The campaign promoted Season 9 of the series Supernatural and allowed fans an opportunity to tweet with the official AXN India twitter handle for a day.

How often does anyone get to tweet using a popular brand's profile on Twitter? Given the kind of grievances brands receive on the platform, it is anybody's guess as to how many would want to do it in the first place. AXN India, however, believes that people do want to tweet as a brand, and had launched a Twitter campaign to engage fans on the same lines.

Conceptualised by digital agency Foxymoron, the campaign promoted Season 9 of the series Supernatural. It gave fans an opportunity to tweet with the official AXN India Twitter handle for a day. AXN invited two of its contest winners in Delhi and Mumbai to take over the AXN India Twitter handle and interact with its fan base of 12,000 people. The winners were also awarded official signed merchandise of Supernatural.

The channel earlier conducted a three-day Twitter contest called the 'Supernatural Fantasy Plotline' where the fans were asked to send what they thought would be the content of the season premier. Contestants had to tweet using the hashtag #SPNFantasyPlot.

Fans shared gripping plots for the Winchester Brothers from where Season 8 ended. Each day, one plotline was selected from Facebook and Twitter entries and carried forward as the next day's starting point in the plotline. This way, fans built an entire plotline for the latest season. The imaginative stories and tweets by the fans were also turned into posters and shared with the AXN India Facebook audience.

On the evening of the premiere (September 13), the brand takeover on Twitter with the hashtag #SPN9onAXN trended on Twitter at #2 position in India, reaching out to 46,300 people and garnering 7,01,200 exposures, which was also endorsed by Twitter as a best practice for building engagement.

Speaking about the campaign, Himmat Butalia, marketing director, AXN India, says, "Supernatural has always been a huge property for AXN and this cult show has an unprecedented fan following in the country. AXN has always taken initiatives that get fans to engage with the brand at regular intervals through innovative campaigns. 'Supernatural Fantasy Plotline' gives fans an ownership of the brand's communication channel. Going forward too AXN will strive to engage with more fans while providing them with thrilling content from across the world."

Harshil Karia, co-founder and online strategist, Foxymoron, states, "Supernatural has a huge fan base which is absolutely loyal to the show. Through this campaign, we aimed to give wings to their imagination, and an opportunity to share their story with other fans. The brand takeover by two Supernatural fans tweeting and interacting with the followers, gives the brand immense return on relationship."

In August, AXN had revived its weekend programming with the launch of Supernatural Thrillathon, with the telecast of three seasons of Supernatural.

The channel was so far airing script-based shows from Monday to Thursday and movies on weekends. With Supernatural, it extended the telecast days of a series to weekends. While the seventh and eighth seasons of Supernatural aired for 46 days back-to-back, every day at 9 pm ending in September, the ninth season was launched on October 11.

Supernatural Season 9 is being simulcast in the US. Supernatural is an American supernatural drama television series created by Eric Kripke, which was first broadcast in 2005. Starring Jared Padalecki as Sam Winchester and Jensen Ackles as Dean Winchester, the series follows two brothers as they hunt demons, ghosts, monsters and other figures of the supernatural.