Creative strategy and social creative direction for the awards campaign focused on the exceptional directing, writing and performances.

The Brief

The client wanted awards creative that went beyond the category’s conventions. They asked for vertical-first, platform-native content with real personality, using the film's elevated writing and tone as driving factors.

The Kernel

The core of American Fiction is a Black character story that breaks from the ones Hollywood usually tells. Jeffrey Wright’s Monk is a prickly, brilliant novelist who refuses to perform the version of Black life the industry expects of him. Around that story sits the film’s texture: wit, depth, and sophistication, in a literary and academic world. The story is the draw. The wit and the world tell the audience what kind of film it is and who it’s for.

The Strategy

Let the film’s own sensibility set the campaign’s register. The content sounded the way the film does, smart, dry, and a little knowing, and drew its look and voice from the literary and academic world instead of the usual awards-season gravity. The performances and the first-time director sat inside that world as proof of the craft.

The Work

• Character-focused pieces. Content built around the people at the center of the story, Wright’s Monk and the performances around him, so the awards case rested on the characters and not on a generic highlight reel.

• Script-to-screen. Pairings of script pages with the finished scenes, which suit a film about writers and give the page-to-performance craft a place in the campaign.

• Awards announcements. Nomination and recognition content designed in the same voice and vertical format as the rest of the campaign, in place of the standard announcement graphic.