Inside Netflix’s strategy to make Wednesday an outcast icon

Modern television doesn’t have much more of a sure thing than Season 2 of the hit Netflix show Wednesday. The new season comes almost three years after the show’s initial 2022 debut, which garnered 350 million views and holds the record as the streamer’s most popular English-language show ever.

These levels of scale and pop cultural pull make Wednesday a marketing dream. So far, it’s been Netflix’s largest prelaunch social campaign ever, with more than 3 billion owned social impressions. 

I spoke to Netflix CMO Marian Lee about the streamer’s investment in outdoor advertising, how the team chooses its limited number of brand partnerships, and the strategies it uses to evolve the campaign in real time.

Big Outcast Energy

Last March, Lee told me that every campaign for a Netflix property has to begin by establishing a clear overall creative strategy and point of view, which then provides a lens or filter through which the marketing teams in countries around the world can determine the best way to express it in their markets. For Wednesday Season 2, that perspective was what Lee calls “Big outcast energy.”

“There is so much fan connection with Wednesday being an outcast that the creative platform almost writes itself,” Lee says. “Everything was through the lens of this girl who is a doom-and-gloom outcast. Everyone has a little bit of that inside of them, and so there is that emotional connection. So for Season 2, we did a lot more around this big outcast energy and playing off of Wednesday and Enid, in particular. When you have a character like Wednesday, it really brings a lot to the table for us to work with.” 

The brand has leaned into outdoor ads in a big way, using billboards and bus benches to juxtapose Wednesday’s doom and gloom with Enid’s bright and shiny vibe. 

One of Lee’s favorite pieces of work is when Wednesday and Enid go full meta about advertising the show itself. Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday is bemoaning the obligation, while Emma Myers’s Enid is fully bought in. “It’s just perfect,” Lee says. “Of course, Wednesday would hate making promotional material. It’s just a cute self-awareness that I love.”

Picking brand partners

Brand partners have been scrambling to work with Netflix since before Stranger Things chugged New Coke back in 2019. Squid Game rolled out collabs with Kia, Duolingo, and Crocs earlier this year. And Wednesday is no exception. 

Wendy’s has collaborated on an entire Wednesday-curated “Meal of Misfortune” that includes two of four inferno-inspired mystery sauces called “Dips of Dread,” along with “Rest in 10-Piece” nuggets, “Cursed & Crispy” fries, and a “Raven’s Blood” Frosty, all served in custom packaging. 

Netflix has teamed with Booking.com for a campaign that will invite travelers to discover the world through the eyes of Catherine Zeta-Jones’s Morticia Addams. And for Cheeto’s, the focus is on the show’s mischievous severed-hand character, Thing. The brand’s new “spokeshand” makes the tie-in to orange-dusted fingertips obvious and inspired. 

“The approach we take with all partnerships is that we set the creative bar really high,” Lee says. “We want to work with partners who can appreciate the IP and appreciate that our bar for creative work that we’re going to put out in the world utilizing our IP isn’t just going to be a logo slap.”

The company’s international brand partnerships for the show include Spanish insurance company Línea Directa Aseguradora, Brazilian soda Guaraná, Cheetos in Mexico, and São Paulo, Brazil-based Nubank. 

Netflix would not comment on specific marketing budget and revenue numbers. The company’s 2024 earnings report showed an overall sales and marketing spend of $2.9 billion. According to data firm Parrot Analytics, Wednesday made $360 million in advertising and subscription revenue for Netflix between its November 2022 release and March of this year.

“[Brands] have their own goals, and we have our own goals, and so when we set out to have a partnership, overall we’re really thinking about what would fit here,” Lee says. “And not everything will work, right? So we tend to bring big creative ideas to partners that we know share that same sensibility and are willing to go out with us and ideate on something.”

Led by fandom

When Lee started at Netflix four years ago, the company was in the midst of shooting the first season of Wednesday in Romania. The marketing team told her that the show was going to be a hit. Like, a really big hit. But even then, the scale of the fan response surprised everyone. 

“We knew it would be big and we had planned for it, but not for how deep the fandom went, how they were going to dress, how they were going to do their makeup, how they were going to look, how it almost normalized anyone who’s never fit in,” Lee says. “And we rode off of a lot of the fan momentum.”

That included partnering with Lady Gaga after a fan cut together a dance scene from the show with the artist’s song “Bloody Mary.” It sparked a tremendous 1,800% spike in the song’s Spotify streams, and led to Gaga shooting a Wednesday-inspired video herself. 

Lee says that in all of its marketing, Netflix tries to plan for the unexpected to react to how fans are embracing and engaging with its shows.

For Season 2 of Wednesday, Lady Gaga is reportedly dropping a new song called “Dead Dance” that will make an appearance in the show.  

The marketing team for the new season is the same as it was for the original, so Lee says there is a built-in expertise on the IP and how fans are engaging with it. That requires constant, real-time monitoring of what fans are up to across all platforms, particularly Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok. This gives the marketing team invaluable feedback on everything from brand partnerships to billboard copy.

“They’re really vocal,” Lee says, “because they have such heart and love for these characters.”