Promotion tactics for Netflix’s adaptation of Stephen King’s ‘Mr. Harrigan’s Phone’ include AirDropping thousands of passerby

In the Netflix original film Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, Craig is haunted by cryptic text messages being sent from beyond the grave. To promote the coming-of-age horror movie ahead of its release, why not give would-be viewers a taste of that same feeling?

Netflix and agency David Miami decided to do just that in Times Square in New York and on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. In the first week of October, some passersby, in view of Netflix billboards sporting cryptic text-message bubbles, received sudden AirDrop requests on their iPhones. 

Those AirDrop requests contained an image of the billboard, urging the recipients to look at the text messages more closely. Adding to the mystery, the requests were labeled as being sent from Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the fictional location where the eponymous Mr. Harrigan (and his iPhone) is laid to rest in the film.

Using AirDrop is certainly one way to cut through to consumers faced with seemingly endless pieces of content and advertising.

“The billboard was already the main part of the idea of seeing these enigmatic messages, and we know the best way to multiply that effect is to put the billboard onto their phones,” said Ander Perez, an associate copywriter at David Miami who worked on the campaign. “We wanted to give people more and more hints to figure out what we were trying to say.”

Whether or not users accepted the requests didn’t matter much to the agency; just pushing people to look down at their phones was enough to do the trick. (If you were wondering, just over 200 people actually accepted the AirDrop file-transfer request.)

“We went and visited the billboard in Times Square and we could see people looking at their phones as they were walking by,” David Miami chief content officer Rafa Donato said. “It was like seeing the ad in action.”

There was a plan to help curious passersby puzzle out the mystery; David Miami had already set up paid keywords on Google to hopefully redirect confused recipients to info about Mr. Harrigan’s Phone.

It was all part of a larger effort to encourage interest in the Ryan Murphy-produced film, which debuted on Netflix on Oct. 5, using something of an experiential curiosity gap. The film is currently the second most popular English-language film on Netflix since its release, according to Netflix’s Top 10 tracker.

“Sometimes it’s better that you count on people’s curiosity,” Donato said. “I think that’s kind of the marketing premise of this. People like to be challenged, and people do like to figure out things on their own. I would say that when you do that, the message sticks even more.”

In addition to the AirDrops and the billboards, which ran through Thursday, Oct. 6, David Miami hosted an experiential installment in Madison Square Park over the weekend dubbed “Bury your phone.” At the park, actors dressed as employees for Mr. Harrigan’s Phone Burial Service encouraged visitors to dispose of their old phones, said Sophia Malcoyannis, David Miami’s associate art director.

People who disposed of their old devices received a death certificate for their phone, along with one free month of Netflix. (The old phones were collected for proper recycling, Donato said.)

Like the cryptic AirDrops, the phone-burial stunt was designed to hopefully incentivize people to learn more about the movie and perhaps check it out for themselves.

“I think a lot of advertising is over-explanatory,” Donato said. “Here’s a case where the less you explain, the less you say, the better it is.”