Indie agency + Indie show = Box office smash
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Exverus earned Gold at the 2025 Festival of Media North America Awards for "The Chosen: Indie Streams to Big Screens"
The Challenge:
It’s red carpet season in Hollywood, and all eyes are on the stars of Hollywood Boulevard premiering their new blockbusters. But could the next box office hit be an indie TV show…set 2,000 years ago? We proved it could!
Led by Exverus VP of Media Planning & Strategy Tasha Day and Media Director Anna Elema, the planning and performance marketing teams behind the campaign engineered an entirely new model for the entertainment industry: Instead of movies starting in theaters then going home to streaming, we took an existing TV series and expanded it to movie screens. It was an unusual strategy; we didn’t have a dollar to waste. We had to build major anticipation to make Season 5’s theatrical debut successful!
"It's exciting to be part of this unconventional way of bringing entertainment and content to people. I do think it very much could be the way of the future. It's shifting from traditional studios to making it about what the fans want, and they're showing (or they're proving) that they want it by investing in it."
--Tasha Day, VP of Media Planning, Exverus by Brainlabs
The Strategy: Infiltrate mainstream culture
Our media strategy leveraged the show’s biggest strength: community. Community-building has been core to The Chosen’s business model from day one. Unlike traditional big-studio funding, they relied on a patchwork of individual contributions, nonprofits, licensing fees, and merch sales to keep the lights on.
We knew video-driven media, featuring heart-stopping visuals everywhere fans gathered online, would be huge. But viewing platforms are fragmented, so measurement would be a challenge; and engaging with social media or an app does not equate to going out to the movies. We needed to bridge the gap. A job like this required a few influential people to rally the masses: Enter famed Vogue photographer Annie Leibovitz, who shot gorgeous portraits of the cast on set.
To maximize Leibovitz’s work in public, we planned our biggest digital out-of-home (DOOH) media activation ever: a Times Square takeover followed by multilingual billboards across the globe: Los Angeles, Rome, Madrid, Sao Paolo and more.
Digital audio would be another exciting avenue for storytelling and calls-to-action; while interactive digital media builds would cultivate community and drive traffic. For fun and measurability, we designed immersive, shareable Snapchat lenses to make Gen Z fans get hands-on.
The Results: A record-breaking year
We catapulted awareness and fandom larger than we thought possible! And set a personal box office record in the process…
Non-viewer awareness of the show increased 44%, to a whopping 72% in Season 5! DISQO brand lift studies showed an aided awareness level 4.6x Entertainment category norms.
After the Times Square takeover, financial contributions to the show spiked significantly
Variety, Yahoo!, IMDb, The Tonight Show w/Jimmy Fallon, The View, and other top-tier outlets featured the iconic strategy.
And most importantly, "The Chosen: Last Supper" sold 6.1MM tickets, grossing $50MM in theaters to set a new record and putting the franchise at over $140MM in global lifetime revenue!
Our omnichannel media plan reached beyond core audiences while expanding The Chosen as genre-breaking entertainment.
We were even awarded Gold for Best Campaign by an Indie Agency at the 2025 Festival of Media: North America Awards! Watch the official campaign case video below:
About the Indie Agency Award
Festival of Media: North American Awards (FOMNA) was launched in 2017 and has significantly grown every year since. It recognizes, benchmarks and amplifies the best of the best media work from North America and Canada. The jury, featuring industry leaders from Google, The Coca-Cola Company, Meta, PepsiCo, Amazon, Microsoft, Mars, L’Oréal, and Audible, convened for the final round of judging to determine this year’s winners. The awards were announced live on Thursday, December 11th, 2025 in New York. See the full list of winners here.
About the Director
Anna Elema is a Media Planning Director at Exverus and CampaignUS' 2026 Media Planner/Buyer of the Year honoree. Currently overseeing full-funnel advertising strategy for smash TV hit 'The Chosen', Anna's 11 years growing Fortune 500 brands like MasterClass and Stella & Chewy's have earned Adweek Media Plans of the Year, MediaPost Planning & Buying Awards, and MediaPost OMMAs. She earned her degree in Psychology from Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
Wonder what we can do for your brand this year? Drop us a line below, and let's talk!
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