Speak No Evil

Welcoming everyone on socials into our home for an oh-so-perfect escape.

Overview

Come on in… we’ve been expecting you. DMM joined Universal Pictures and Blumhouse in becoming the sickeningly sweet and sinister vacation hosts for the social campaign of the film, Speak No Evil. We invited audiences to become our VIP guests, teasing them with all the fun we had planned for their big trip. This entailed crafting core campaign creatives and adopting an eerily charming host persona to infuse into our voice and tone. As we prepared our guests for their stay, we made sure they knew their hosts were ready to play.

universal blum-house

OBJECTIVES

Our guests were in for quite the trip. We designed each piece of social content to build tension and create a rising, unsettling feeling. We selected scenes that highlighted our mercurial hosts, particularly James McAvoy’s character and his increasingly off-kilter behavior. To nod at the evil hidden within our host family, we adjusted lighting by darkening scenes. We were strategic with sound design, integrating high-pitched sound effects, subtle shushing and hints of ominous laughter, heightened screams, and well-timed cuts to complete silence. This feeling carried over to our text design as well, which saw the use of textured fonts, text flicker, and strategic use of letter capitalization and italicization. Through this carefully curated creative strategy, we pushed our guests further into levels of uncomfortability.

We kept our guests on their toes – pushing them just far enough to raise suspicion, but not alarm. Our social voice was very deliberate. We greeted our guests with an elevated air of practiced politeness and playful charm to ease their guards down. As they made themselves at home, we wove in twinges of leering unpleasantries throughout each word we crafted.

As we got closer to our getaway, we provided live platform coverage on Instagram Stories during the film’s NYC premiere. We created clean background templates to frame the footage and stylized each slide with delightful yet dark messaging in fonts that mirrored our campaign aesthetic.

RESULTS

As our dear guests sat back, relaxed, and enjoyed their stay, we reached more than 53.9M users and generated over 598.5K engagements and 79.6M impressions across Facebook, X, and Instagram. We knew that once everyone came to visit, they wouldn’t dream of leaving, so we gently encouraged them to extend their time at the theaters and rewatch to their heart’s desire in the days following release. With a close eye on every detail of the social campaign, we assured that our guests were very, very well taken care of as they joined us for the trip of a lifetime.

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