When the show is about deception, the launch should behave like one.
Special Ops 2 was returning to JioHotstar after a long hiatus, on the back of a successful first season. The brief was top-of-funnel awareness — re-earn the audience ahead of the drop. The show dealt with cyber terrorism, misinformation, digital vulnerability. We could describe that — or behave like it.
We staged one. A confidential JioHotstar lineup deck went live through official channels and seeded into creator communities, piracy boards, and private messaging groups. For a few hours, it travelled the way real leaks do: fast, breathless, repeated as fact. Plausibility was the brief — believable enough to spread, specific enough to feel real.
Every click inside the deck resolved into the same place — Kay Kay Menon and Vinay Pathak, in character, warning viewers about clicking suspicious links. The audience that bit on the leak was, briefly, the audience the show was actually about.
24.4M reach. 1.5M engagement across the launch window. The campaign doubled as a public service message — and the launch didn't describe the show, it acted out its thesis.