The Emmy Award-winning "Abbott Elementary" is ABC’s hit comedy that takes place in an underfunded Philadelphia public school. It follows a group of passionate teachers, an enigmatic janitor, and a hilarious principal trying their best despite the odds stacked against them.
ABC's objective was to excite viewers for "Abbott Elementary" Season 4 and invite new viewers to tune into the October 9th premiere. The network looked to create funny, shareable social posts that would excite “Abbott Elementary" fans for the show's return and drive new viewers to tune in by giving them a sense of the show's award-winning comedy.
To celebrate "Abbott Elementary" Season 4 and invite returning fans and new viewers to tune into the premiere, ABC built a series of hilarious images created to look like yearbook photos featuring the cast of the series. Each school photo-like image was accompanied by quotes from the new season, and came complete with "most likely to" superlatives, each more hilarious and disastrous than the last. The images were created specifically for fans to share on Reddit and social media.
The campaign aimed to reach an audience usually left untouched by social media campaigns and utilize a format that many Reddit users would be familiar with to convey the antics and setting of the series in a quick and fun way.
ABC’s team built and designed the Reddit images with the intent to look evocative of classic yearbooks that adult viewers would remember from their high school days. The up-and-to-the-right gaze, the stock school photo background curtain, the watermarks, the off-white matting, and the watercolor brushed paper were all carefully hand-selected to incite nostalgia and familiarity in viewers, while also heightening them to make them a little bit ridiculous.
ABC's social posts were a major success in drawing viewers to the "Abbott Elementary" Season 4 premiere. The episode amassed 6.33 million cross-platform viewers in seven days of viewing.
