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The second season of Severance came out after a three-year wait since the release of its first and highly acclaimed season. For the new season, Apple TV’s marketing team decided to take a fascinating approach, one not relying solely on the digital space.
Severance itself has a unique premise, following the journey of four employees in a massive conglomerate called Lumon. Lumon specializes in a futuristic procedure using an implant that can sever people’s minds into two, causing employees to lose all memories from the outside world while they are at work and likewise having no memories of their job while they are off the clock. The implications of this, of course, present many ethical issues with how the employees of Lumon are being treated. As the show progresses, the premise also creates and explores questions about workplace privacy, personal identity, and surveillance.
The marketing strategy for Severance's second season embarks on a meta-metaphorical stunt that uses the premise of the show brilliantly.
First, a life-sized pop-up was built at Grand Central Station in New York, resembling the Lumon office on the Severed Floor in the show. This glass cubical was already a great way to physically advertise the new season, as it was placed where everyone who passed could see and even explore.
This wasn’t where it stopped, though. On January 14, the main cast of the show, among them Adam Scott, Britt Lower, and Zach Cherry, actually arrived at the pop-up as their characters and spent three hours inside the see-through office.

Via @lesIiebens, omid armin
An excited audience stood there and watched them do mundane office work while fully in character, and documented it all on social media for fans all over the world to admire. It wasn’t just marketing; it was a physical embodiment of everything the show is about—performance art at its finest. It was captivating to see these characters come to life while the audience had a chance to be a part of an entertainment they only ever see on their screen.
But why is it so important?
It is no secret that without marketing, we wouldn’t be aware of most of the content or the products we consume on a daily basis. And since we mostly experience life through our screens, digital marketing is usually the easier and more effective way to go. Simply pump up those ads and maybe ask your Gen Z TikTok manager to use a viral sound on one of your videos, and you are pretty much good to go. But with the amount of content we consume, these simply become boring and predictable until they drown in a sea of similarly looking ads.
Creativity is still very much necessary to engage the audience in the product you are trying to sell, and the physical element of that is just as crucial. This is why most of the best marketing campaigns in recent years were executed out in the open.
Last year, the team of House of the Dragon, HBO’s Game of Thrones spin-off, built a dragon on top of the Empire State Building to advertise the show’s return, and it was all everyone could talk and speculate about all week.
When everyone was going crazy over Barbie, you could tell the film's team was not lacking in the marketing budget, as you had to live under a rock not to know this movie was coming out. And even though they could have sufficed with pink billboards and social media campaigns, they also saw the importance of a public reminder of the upcoming movie. Their take on a physical embodiment of Barbie? A beautiful life-sized Barbie dream house in Malibu, that was even available to rent on Airbnb.
Via Variety
There were even many attempts to use AI to create fake public displays to market certain products, like Maybelline’s CGI Mascara commercial in London, which had many people fooled by thinking it was real, and arguably was what made it work. Since then, countless other brands tried this method out, but if you ask me, an actual real-life campaign is much better than relying on CGI.
The success of all these campaigns had everything to do with their physicality and the outside-of-the-box creative thinking that this type of marketing required.
Think about your most beloved entertainment pieces–favorite TV shows or favorite films and how fascinating it can be to find yourself in some kind of a physical embodiment of it. Not only does it excite fans, but it gets to be observed by new eyes and new audiences it would have never reached otherwise. The tangibility and physical manifestations of art are what bring it to life, and if that manifestation helps spread awareness, everybody wins.
That doesn’t mean that advertising still doesn’t need the digital space. Without it, most of us wouldn’t even know about any of these physical marketing stunts. But the collaboration of the two brings the best results, the most viral internet moments, and the most anticipated products and content.
It would be great to see more marketing stunts like these come to life, especially when they perfectly align with what they're trying to promote, as the genius marketing team of Severance has so elegantly demonstrated.
Via Ben Stiller