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Microsoft employees stream down a hallway by the dozen, smartphones and paper coffee cups in hand, many clad in heavy coats on this frigid February morning. The setting is idyllicLake Washington is in full view through floor-to-ceiling windowsbut they stride purposefully. As they do, they pass a digital sign with a tersely worded call to action: All squads ship Competing/differentiating Growing work every sprint to double Successful Sessions ABS(Always Be Shipping) Despite the profusion of Microsofties on the premises, this isnt Microsofts sprawling Redmond campus. Instead, these staffers have taken over a Hyatt hotel in Renton, another Seattle suburb. They work for a division known as Microsoft AIMAI for shortand have traveled from corporate outposts as distant as the U.K., Switzerland, China, and India to attend a team off site. Mustafa Suleyman, MAIs CEO, instituted these conclaves upon arriving at Microsoft just under a year agopart of an unorthodox mass hiring in which the software behemoth absorbed most of the staff from Inflection AI, the startup Suleyman cofounded in 2022. The gatherings take place roughly once every seven weeks, and part of their purpose is unblinking self-assessment. Ahead of the meeting, around 80 squads of 6 to 15 people apiece have rated themselves on their success in hitting recent deadlines on a scale of red, amber, or green. The results arent greatbut Suleyman sees that as progress in itself. It’s taken a few cycles to get people to be basically honest in terms of their scoring, he tells me shortly after presiding over the events keynote presentation. And this time, there was lots of redlike almost 45% red. I think that was a really, really good moment; and we sort of stood up and owned it. I was very proud of the team. Though being CEO of something called Microsoft AI sounds like a job of nearly unlimited purview, Suleyman does have a more specific remit. Hes charged with using AI to transform the companys consumer properties, including the free Copilot chatbot app available on the web and in versions for Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Android. The progress MAI measures in squad-size chunks all levels up to a much higher goal: building an AI companion that not only answers questions accurately but performs tasks based on a deep understanding of your needs. And not just an anodyne chatbot, but a warm and relatable persona youll enjoy spending time with. In its present form, Copilot has barely begun to hint at this wildly ambitious vision. But as Microsoft pushes forward, You’ll start to see Copilot become a platform that enables a personalized AI companion for you, promises Suleyman. It’ll have its own name, have its own visual representation, have its own personality, and really be your sidekick. What we are building is your second brain, your aide, your consigliere, your reliable chief of staff in your pocket. Its lofty talk, but Suleymanwhose round, wire-frame glasses help give him the presence of a particularly glib owlhas a knack for explaining AI in a compelling fashion. His cautionary 2023 book on the subject, The Coming Wave, was a New York Times Best Seller; his 2024 TED talk, What is an AI Anyway? has been viewed 2.7 million times. More importantly, his bona fides include cofounding not just Inflection, but before that DeepMind in 2010. The London-based company made computing history when it created software that taught itself to play the famously complex Chinese board game, Go, better than any human. Then it developed an algorithm for predicting how proteins fold themselves, a transformative tool for drug discovery. Both of those landmark feats reached fruition after Google acquired DeepMind in 2014; Suleyman left DeepMind in 2019 and exited Google altogether in 2022, shortly before founding Inflecton. In 2023, Google merged the company with another AI arm, Google Brain, to form Google DeepMind, with Suleymans fellow cofounder Demis Hassabis as CEO. The combined operation is responsible for the Gemini large language model now used in many Google products, putting Suleyman in direct competition with his former colleagues. (Suleyman says he remains friendly with Hassabis, but argues that competition fuels creativity, noting that in February, he recruited the engineers responsible for one of Googles best-received uses of AI: its uncanny Audio Overview synthetic podcasts.) In terms of raw users, Copilot has some catching up to do. According to data from intelligence company Similarweb, the consumer versionwhich is distinct from the one thats part of the Microsoft 365 productivity suitehad a desktop and mobile web audience of just 15.6 million in January. That was far behind OpenAIs ChatGPT (246 million), Chinese upstart DeepSeek (79.97 million), and Gemini (47.3 million), though ahead of Perplexity (10.6 million) and Anthropics Claude (8.2 million). This data doesnt include people who use Microsofts free Copilot app, but market intelligence firm Sensor Tower says that ChatGPT currently has 30 times the monthly active users of consumer Copilot. Microsoft is not wholly dependent on Copilot to reach consumers. Bing, another part of Suleymans portfolio, may only have 4% of the search market to Googles 90%, according to StatCounter, but with an audience of 174 million people in January, its larger than any AI bot except ChatGPT, per Similarweb. His group also oversees Microsofts Edge web browser, which comes bundled with Windows and could become a potent AI delivery system of its own. And over time, Suleymans AI companion vision might give Copilot more market traction by clearly differentiating it from ChatGPT. (The two products share many technical underpinnings thanks to the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership.) Still, the relative tininess of Copilots current user base shows that the vision of Microsofts signature consumer-AI effort has yet to transform into the kind of mass attention the company cares about. For Copilot to be truly useful for you long term, it needs to not only be able to ingest all your long-form documents and your email and your calendar and your context, but it needs to not forget what you’ve talked about a couple of sessions ago. And we are getting really good at that now. [Photo: Carlton Canary for Fast Company] Then again, its not like anyone else has truly figured out consumer AI. The industrys often-clumsy stabs at itsuch as Googles gaffe-ridden AI Overviews and short-lived Meta bots personified by the likes of Snoop Dogg and Paris Hiltoncan feel like answers to questions nobody asked. Every single company is trying to understand what the market wants at this point, says Divya Kumar, Microsofts general manager of search and AI marketing. Weve barely scratched the surface. But Suleyman cant depend on Microsofts rivals flailing forever; if MAI doesnt create the first true AI consigliere, somebody else surely will. Hence, the intensity he brings to managing and motivating his team, a job he describes as building the cultural flywheel that then builds the product. That goal was apparent in a February email to his staffwritten shortly after DeepSeeks stunningly efficient LLM shocked the AI industryin which Suleyman predicted more surprises ahead and called for a great hunkering down. What MAI needs from everyone this year is extreme focus, he wrote. The competition will be unlike anything weve seen. This is for real. This is the time to do the best work of your lives. The son of an English nurse mother and Syrian cab-driver father, Suleyman landed on AI as his lifes work not because he was in love with the technology for its own sake, but because he saw its potential to make the world a better place. At 19, he dropped out of the University of Oxford, where he studied philosophy and theology, to help start a telephone counseling service for Muslim youth. He then served as a human rights policy officer for London Mayor Ken Livingston and cofounded a consultancy dedicated to driving societal change on a global scale. Suleyman was only 25 when he and two friends, who had the training in computer science he lacked (Hassabis and Shane Legg), started DeepMind in 2010. The company was a bet on their conviction that evermore-powerful supercomputers would lead to an epoch-shifting moment when AI would surpass human cognitive ability across an array of disciplines. Legg called that phenomenon Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI. Early on, their faith that AIs future would be extraordinary was so contrarian, Suleyman says, that we never really talked openly about our ambition to build AGIthat was always something that we whispered in hushed tones to each other and among a very small group.” Eventually, though, the entire field adopted AGI as a conceptand a goal. DeepMind indeed made historic progress, putting Suleyman at the heart of the AI revolution just as it was taking off. But in a major career setback, he left DeepMind in 2019reportedly not by choice but precipitated by complaints from employees that he had a bullying management style. In a 2022 podcast, he accepted the criticismI really screwed upand said that hed since worked with an executive coach to become a better boss. By the end of his DeepMind tenure, Suleyman says, he was itching to get AI out of the lab and into the real world. Rather than leave Google altogether, he spent another two years at the company as VP of AI product management and AI policy. Among his responsibilities was working with the Google Brain team, which had developed an LLM called LaMDA. At the time, ChatGPT didnt exist; even OpenAIs GPT LLM hadnt proven itself capable of powering radically new AI experiences. LaMDA was at GPT-3 level performance, at least a year earlier than GPT-3, Suleyman remembers. Leveraging it into new Google features would have been a bold, attention-grabbing move. But it also would have been risky and required sign-off from many internal stakeholders. Suleyman struggled to rally support. That was really on me, he says. I was the one trying to get this out the doorpersuade the lawyers, persuade the policy people, persuade Google Search. And for some reason, there was just a series of mental blockers in the company. Concluding that this effort had reached a standstill, Suleyman departed Google in January 2022. Officially, he was joining venture capital firm Greylock as a partner. Barely more than a month later, however, he returned to AI with the launch of Inflection. Suleyman and his cofounders, DeepMind principal research scientist Karén Simonyannow MAIs chief scientistand LinkedIn cofounder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman quickly lined up $225 million in funding. Suleyman didnt spell out the startups exact plans beyond acknowledging they involved making it easier for humans to communicate with computers: It feels like were on the cusp of being able to generate language to pretty much human-level performance, he told CNBC. What that meant became clearer in May 2023, when Inflection introduced Pi, its chatbot. Short for personal intelligence and available on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as well as the web and as an iPhone app, Pi was a rough draft of Suleymans notion of an AI companionoptimized for engaging conversation rather than purely informational utility. I chatted about philosophy with it for what turned out to be 2 hours, wrote an impressed Reddit user. I kept waiting for it to break and say stupid random stuff like [ChatGPT does] but it kept going coherently. As Pi was establishing itself, Suleymanfound himself in an ongoing dialog with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about their companies respective futures. Microsoft had invested in Inflection and was providing the startup with cloud services, so it was only natural theyd talk. But by the winter of 2023a period when Sam Altmans brief ouster at OpenAI highlighted how vulnerable Microsoft had left itself by tethering its AI vision to an outside partnerNadella was proposing scenarios involving Suleyman joining Microsoft in some capacity. Suleyman was willing to listen. Microsoft already had a deep technological platform, a large consumer footprint it knew how to monetize through advertising, and the ability to shovel its formidable resources to high-priority initiativesassets Inflection couldnt match on its own. Furthermore, Suleymans confidence in Inflections initial business plan, which involved building high-cost computing clusters to train its own in-house LLM, Inflection-1, had been shaken by new developments such as Metas open-sourcing of its Llama AI model, which made a world-class LLM available to any company that wanted to use it. I just did not predict that a public company would make the crown jewels available to everybody, he says, calling the realization of how that might impact the competitive landscape painful. Nadella, too, had reason to reassess Microsofts AI strategy, particularly on the consumer front. For all the benefits the company had reaped from its investment in OpenAI, the tantalizing sense that it might help Bing bite into Googles dominance in sudden and dramatic fashion hadnt panned out. Nor had Copilot become ChatGPTs peer in traffic and name recognition, despite being based on some of the same underlying GPT technology. As of right now, it feels to me as an outside observer that they haven’t gotten nearly the leverage that they would’ve wanted on the consumer side, says tech investor and writer M.G. Siegler. Microsoft product manager for model personality Rachel Taylor: The way that you show up for Gen Z versus my mom, who’s just turned 70, has differences in style and delivery, and it should feel different as time goes on. [Photo: Carlton Canary for Fast Company] Suleyman is quick to underline that he could have continued pursuing his AI vision at Inflection, which had raised a total of more than $1.5 billion from investors. On top of that, in November 2023 he met for eight hours with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, who made an enormous offer to raise a gigantic round at a huge price. But over a January 2024 lunch at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Suleyman says, Nadella made an irresistible offer: Come and drive Microsoft through the next decade. One of the most compelling pieces of what he said to me was, We completely missed mobile, referring to Microsofts Windows Phone being thrashed by Apples iPhone and Googles Android, Suleyman remembers. If we completely miss AI in the way that we missed mobile, it’ll be existential for the future of the company. Suleyman says it was a wrenching decision: “We were 70 people. The product was growing like wildfire. We had an amazing roster of investors. But a couple of months after Davos, a deal was announced. Acquiring Inflection would likely have raised antitrust concerns. Instead, Microsoft simply hired Suleyman, Simonyan, and most of the team theyd assembled. (LinkedIn currently lists 59 ex-Inflection staffers now at Microsoft.) Microsoft wont say how much it spent on this gambit; reports put the price tag at $650 millionor maybe moreto license AI models, pay off investors, and compensate Suleyman and other new employees. Along with existing Microsoft employees and additional ones Suleyman would recruit, the Inflection alums are part of MAIa Russian doll of new teams, he says. The company also declines to provide a current head count, but last November, Wireds Steven Levy quoted Suleyman saying about 14,000 people reported up into his team. (Inflection still exists, under new managementSuleyman no longer has an ownership stakeand has pivoted from building an AI companion to selling technology to enterprise customers.) Microsoft general manager of search and AI marketing Divya Kumar: One of the aspects of Mustafa that I really appreciate is his consumer ethos. Everything he thinks about, whether that is product engineering or marketing, he thinks about from the lens of the customer. [Photo: Carlton Canary for Fast Company] Suleymans unsatisfying experience trying to commercialize Googles LaMDA did leave him wary of big-company bureaucracy. The most important thing was figuring out how, culturally, we kept some distance from some of the old patterns in Microsoft that we were worried would slow us down, he says. This was something Satya and I talked about a lot. He was adamant that we would have all the necessary freedoms to operate and we wouldn’t be impeded in any way. The evidence that Nadella was good to his word includes the fact that Suleyman divided his team into small squads of employees who tackl their work in six- or seven-week cycles, an approach he brought with him from Inflection. MAI controls its own tech stack and is responsible for its own recruiting. Despite being part of the ultimate Microsoft shop, it even does some of its collaborating over Slack (I would say we mostly use Teams, Suleyman emphasizes when I ask). Nearly a year into his new job, Suleyman remains keen to shield MAI from certain Microsoftian tendencies. In a November email to staffers, he dutifully praised Microsofts consensus-driven culturebut stated that MAI’s objective should be respectful disagreement, followed up by a complete commitment to the outcome. That bias toward speedy decisiveness is tempered by the self-awareness Suleyman has carefully fostered since getting into trouble at DeepMind. In the lead-up to one team meeting, for instance, he asked his direct reports for examples of recent moves hed made that proved problematic so that he could share them more broadly. Suleyman still doesnt hesitate to describe himself as relentless. But he adds that hes now much more practical and more realistic. In some ways, I’m actually a lot more patient and balanced as well. Thats not far from how MAI staffers describe him: He’s a kind and empathetic person who still manages to have a tremendous level of urgency, says Kya Sainsbury-Carter, corporate VP of Microsoft Advertising, a direct report, and an 18-year veteran of the company. Back at Microsoft AIs off-site meeting, a standing-room-only crowd has assembled for a workshop on understanding Generation Z. The presentation includes TikTok videos in which young people rhapsodize about ChatGPT and excerpts from interviews with high schoolers talking about their busy lives. In an empathy-building exercise, participants discuss what they learned from this exposure to the next generation and how it might be applied to improving Copilot. Such anthropological inquiry is serious stuff at Microsoft, which turns 50 this year and is intent on forging a relationship with consumers who weren’t around for the glory days of the PC. Gen Z demands more than real innovation and crisp aesthetics; they want authenticity, social responsibility, and seamless digital experiences, wrote Suleyman in a January email to MAI staffers. We need to create experiences that truly resonate with these users. Copilot design director and Inflection AI alum Matt Pistachio: We still move quickly as a startup. We still meet together like we used to do. We still have the same vision. We’re just doing it at scale. [Photo: Carlton Canary for Fast Company] Of course, at the scale to which Microsoft is accustomedand hopes Copilot will reacheven delighting an entire generation of consumers wouldnt be enough. The company must consider the needs and desires of individual customers spanning a wide swath of humanity, a test that some on its Windows team have likened to ordering pizza for 1.5 billion people. Indeed, Copilot design director Matt Pistachioone of the Inflection employees who joined Suleyman at MAIgets most animated when telling me how AI can empower his mother, a Lebanese technophobe. She can talk in Arabic, he explains. She can talk in her broken English. She can just say what she wants and she has access to computing. As another Inflection alum, MAIs product manager for model personality Rachel Taylor, puts it, Your AI should feel different than mine. So how can Microsoft even begin to attack the problem of creating an AI companion that teeming masses of people might find indispensablebut each in a slightly different way? Suleyman divvies the necessary elements into three buckets that hes been talking about since the days of Inflections Pi: IQ, AQ, and EQ. IQ covers a companions raw skill at working with factsto answer any question accurately, superfast, be grounded in the real world, [and] provide evidence and citations, he says. AQ references the power to take action on behalf of a useror, using one of the tech industrys favorite current buzzwords, to be agentic. And EQ is about the companions emotional intelligenceits ability to make you feel empowered and make you feel supported and make you feel smarter and more capable. Building out these elements could keep Suleymans team busy for years. A lot of breakthroughs need to happen to be able to get to the vision that he’s got in his mind, says S. Somasegar, Madrona Venture Group managing director (and, previously, a 27-year Microsoft veteran). But some ingredients are falling into place, at least as first drafts. Starting in October, MAI began rolling out the meatiest changes to Copilot since Suleymans arrival. Thanks to voice mode, you can talk to the AI rather than type, and itll talk back. A feature called Think Deeper, based on OpenAIs reasoning o1 model, takes 30 seconds to generate its answers, but is optimized to deliver richer, more sophisticated explanations and advice than the stock model. Copilot Vision lets you carry on spoken conversations with the AI about web pages, say, so it can help suss out pertinent details in an Airbnb listing youre skimming while planning a vacation. A key focus is memory: Copilot knowing you better the more you use it rather than every session being a Groundhog Day-like new start. In February, Microsoft quietly shipped an update that lets it weave topics and ideas from past sessions into new ones: You have a sense that there’s a compounding value, says Suleyman. Microsoft is also working on giving its AI companion enough social grace to master group chats, tailoring its responses to the interests and attitudes of each human in a session. The challenge of making all this work is not just technological. Any AI companin worth its salt will certainly need a world-class LLM under the hood. But the MAI employees at the Hyatt off-site include educators, therapists, linguists, comedy writers, advertisers, designers, Suleyman tells me. Instead of building on the tech industrys past 20 years of consumer experiencesproducts such as Facebook and YouTube that aggregated massive amounts of user-generated content, with its rough edges often part of the appealhe is aiming to tap AI to help attain a level of polish that software has rarely had.We now have this new raw material to make beautiful experiences with, which is much closer to the raw material of Hollywood or game design, he says. We, as humans, love the feeling that arises when you listen to a beautiful piece of music or watch an epic movie or see a director of photography wash color over a scene. Once again, Suleymans rarified description of his aims is running ahead of anything MAI has actually shipped. But some of his aspiration to engage on an emotional level was visible in a blobby, smiling onscreen animated character I glimpsed at MAIs off-site meetingan early, unannounced manifestation of what Copilot would look like if you could see it as well as chat with it. The characters cartoony vibe also happens to scratch an itch Microsoft has had since at least 1992. Thats when the company became smitten with research by Stanford professors Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, which showed that people attribute human qualities to computers and other forms of media. Taking their conclusions as an argument for making software interfaces more anthropomorphic, Microsoft released a quirky Windows add-on called Microsoft Bob. After that flopped, the company doubled down with Office 97s Office Assistants, including that iconic pest Clippy. In the 1990s, Microsoft tried to add a dash of anthropomorphic companionship to software with Microsoft Bob (seen here) and Office Assistants such as Clippy. They went on to be among the companys most famous failures. When it turned out Office users didnt actually want productivity aid from cartoon characters, Microsoft deemphasized Clippy and companyand eventually removed them altogether. More recently, it has good-naturedly embraced the talking paper clip as a totem of failure. If consumers really do find an animated version of Copilot to be irresistible, Clippy can feel free to have a long-delayed last laugh. But applying AI to a synthetic persona also brings risks that were unimaginable in Clippys day. Much of the air went out of Microsofts triumphant reveal of the first version of its consumer Copilot in February 2023 when it turned out to be a slightly terrifying loose cannon, most famously telling New York Times writer Kevin Roose that it loved him and he should leave his wife. (The company moved swiftly to tamp down its new chatbots wild side.) More recently, and far more alarmingly, Google-backed Character AI has been sued by the mother of a teenager whose suicide, she claims, reflected his unhealthy emotional attachment to the startups bots. In another suit, families say their childrens conversations with Character AI bots went in dark directions involving self-harm, violence toward others, and sexualized content. Microsoft is hardly blithe about AI companions potential to go awry. We’re setting the standard for these things existing, says Taylor. And so we have to be totally sure that we’re comfortable with them existing in the world. Her colleague Pistachio adds that the company is building its AI to calmly steer sessions in a responsible direction: It’ll be like, Okay, I think we’ve gone a bit too farI don’t think we should be joshing around this much. Suleyman, whose book The Coming Wave takes AIs perils at least as seriously as its promise, told me repeatedly that keeping it safe is not just vital but the whole point of his career. The goal of the next 50 years, he declares, has to be to make sure that this technology remains subservient to humanity. Yet that hasnt led him away from high-stakes applications of the technology. Former DeepMinders are involved in a new MAI healthcare group, whose mandate he paints in only the broadest strokes for now: Four billion or so people don’t have access to high-quality medical or health advice on a daily basisI think it’s just an amazing opportunity.” Ultimately, Suleyman says, his mission “is to make sure that [AI] genuinely does always remain something that makes our lives healthier and happier. The goal of civilization, in my opinion, is to relieve people of the obligation and pressure to solve shelter, food, community, work, well-being. Even now, as he builds a business at a titan of capitalism thats older than he is, hes still the 25-year-old enthralled by AIs potential to do good.
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For filmmakers with a fondness for certain fonts, using them frequently enough in their work can turn typography into a sort of signature. See the typeface in a film, and you know exactly who the director is. Wes Anderson has an obsession with Futura, while John Carpenter set his film credits in Albertus, a formal serif. Papyrus is now synonymous with James Cameron’s Avatar franchise, and more than 40 of Woody Allen’s films use Windsor. For director Sean Baker, whose comedy-drama Anora won the 2025 Oscar for Best Picture and netted him the Academy Award for Best Director, his font of choice is the tall, narrow, decorative Aguafina Script. Created by type designers Alejandro Paul and Angel Koziupa of the Argentinean type foundry Sudtipos, Aguafina Script is described as semi-formal and eye-catching with characters that flow into each other, perfect for product packaging, glossy magazines, and book covers. Turns out it also works well for movie posters and title sequences, as Baker has proven for more than a decade now with his various projects. [Images: IMDB] Baker told the streaming platform Mubi last year that he first selected Aguafina Script for the title sequence of 2015’s Tangerine, about a transgender sex worker (a film that was shot entirely on iPhones), because he was looking for something that was stylistically interesting and because it subverted the grittiness of the subject matter. It is saying that there is an elegance to this production in the way were presenting the subject matter, he said. After realizing the font could serve the same purpose for 2017’s The Florida Project (about a girl and her single mother who live in a motel near Disney World), he said, If I continue this it could eventually become something that people connect withand connect with my films [the way Carpenter’s and Allen’s fonts did with theirs]. Now when you see those fonts, you think of those filmmakers and their films, said Baker, who utilized Aguafina Script through to the movie posters too. I like to have consistency between my advertising material and the actual credits. By weaving it into the visual identity of his films, including a recently minted Oscar winner, Baker has made Aguafina Script his own, and shown how type can be used to challenge viewers’ preconceived notions.
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When Netflix was finally ready to bring back its massive international hit TV series Squid Game for Season 2 after a three-year hiatus, it had a unique marketing challenge: remind people why they fell in love with a Korean action drama that revolves around a murderous contest. Approximately 39 months had passed since the debut of Squid Game took the world by storm with its coordinated green tracksuits, Pink Guards, and twisted takes on childrens games. The first season exploded to the surprise of everyone, becoming a global pop culture sensation. Back in 2021, Netflix marketing outside Asia was largely reactive to what audiences were excited about. This time, there were years of anticipation. Marian Lee, chief marketing officer at Netflix, says there was an excitement internally to re-create that phenomenon, but also a ton of pressure on her teams. Convincing people to come back to watch the second season is an entirely different proposition than being surprised and having some fun with it. [Photo: Netflix] What came next was a worldwide full-court press of entertainment marketing. Pink Guards were deployed at events, activations, and press appearances around the planet. The Season 2 campaign kicked off at the Paris Olympics. Pink Guards popped up at Sydney Harbor and Bondi Beach, the canals of Venice, Bangkoks Chao Phraya river, Saudi Arabias AlUla, and Beco do Batman in So Paulo. Fans played Red Light, Green Light live under the Pink Guards watchful eyes in Los Angeles, Jakarta, and Warsaw. As of February 14, Season 2 had 14.25 billion owned social impressions, eclipsing Netflixs biggest Instagram and TikTok posts ever. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Netflix Australia & NZ (@netflixanz) As a result, Squid Game Season 2 captured the most premiere-week views of any Netflix show in history. It spent eight consecutive weeks in the Netflix Global Top 10, amassing 185.2 million views in that time, and quickly became the streamers third-most-popular show of all time, after Wednesday and Squid Game Season 1. The marketing strategy behind the shows second season is a case study in how to match and elevate fan-generated hypeand it offers a window into how Netflix operates as a global brand marketing organization. Jakarta [Photo: Netflix] Found in translation Squid Game is first and foremost a Korean show. That was the mantra, and that was the foundation from which Lee and Netflix approached the marketing of the show. We have teams in 40 markets around the world, and it would be very American for us to say, Okay, well, now that it’s the biggest show, we’re going to have our largest marketing and publicity teams in L.A. run the campaign, Lee says. It was very important for me that the Korea team retained the strategy for how global teams were going to execute against it. This was a major shift for the streamers most popular properties like Stranger Things, Wednesday, and Bridgerton, which are exported from the U.S. marketing organization to the rest of the world. Lee created a global task force to connect major markets with the Korean team. There were translators in every meeting, even though everyone spoke English, to make sure any cultural nuances werent overlooked. Sao Paulo [Photo: Netflix] Lee spent the better part of two years cultivating and setting up the relationships between the Korean team and other major markets, in order for the rollout of Season 2and now the forthcoming Season 3to be as strong as possible. The coordination wasnt to make sure everyone followed the same playbook, but for the Korean team to really set the creative strategy and then the other marketing teams to take that and figure out the best way to express it in their markets. Creative strategies and creative platforms is the starting point, where everything emanates from, but where you can deviate across markets is in partnerships, or media placements and things like that, Lee says. So it was really important for us to spend a lot of time arguing and debating about that creative start point. One debate was around the theme of choice in the second season, represented by a voting system that allowed players to choose to stay or leave after each game. The Korean marketing team felt that was the center pointthat moral choice. Yet it wasnt resonating with the other teams. It’s important that when you’re dealing with different cultures and different languages, you have to find a creative start point that is literally so simple that any agency can run with it, Lee explains. London [Photo: Netflix] This translated into the idea of choosing to participate being a major part in all the live experienes across markets. Runners in tracksuits raced up the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Brazilian fans competed in Squid Game-themed competitions. The brand threw a Squid Game-themed rave in London. The nice thing about Netflix is that you can have a center creative strategy, but every market is going to have different flavors of how they activate with fans, Lee says. Paris [Photo: Netflix] Playing the brand game When Season 1 of Squid Game dropped in 2021, there were no international brand partners or collaborations. And yet Vans slip-on sneakers sales increased almost 8,000%. Duolingo saw a 40% increase in Korean language learners. For Season 2, with plenty of lead time, Netflix lined up a laundry list of brand partners, including Puma for those green tracksuits, Call of Duty, Kia, limited-edition Crocs, Duolingo, and more. But just like the creative strategy, Lee says local markets were in charge of what brand collabs would work best for their audiences. This is a global show, so you really could have global partners, but we also asked all the teams, Who are important partners in your market? says Lee. The result was a mix of brands that wouldnt normally be attached to a single property. In food alone, it was McDonalds in Australia, Burger King in France, Domino’s in the U.S., and Carl’s Jr. in Mexico. KFC Spain sold more than 400,000 units from its exclusive Squid Game menu and brought in more than $4 million in sales during its four-week runits most successful activation ever. We just said, Okay, what really matters for your market? Make sure you’re doing the most creative and the most fun way to engage with your fans. And I think that really worked, Lee says. Netflix announced last month that Season 3 will launch in June, about six months after Season 2. Lee says this allows both the streamer and brand partners to better bridge that relatively short gap. That short window is amazing for riding high off of Season 2 straight into Season 3 without wasting media dollars. We can just keep activating and engaging fans now through creative social, Lee explains. Beyond that, the brand will keep momentum going with live experiences in Australia, New York City, and Seoul, as well as a video game on its platform. Warsaw [Photo: Netflix] Fans lead the way The biggest insight that helped Netflix’s Squid Game marketing strategy is one Lee says has already helped other shows and properties. Lees teams work to find the parts of a show fans gravitate to most, then create content, experiences, brand partnerships, and more around that. Focus on the fans and really start organically, that is always the recipe for success for Netflix, she says. For Squid Game Season 2, it was iconography like the tracksuits and Pink Guards, combined with the desire to participate in some (nonlethal!) version of the games. The start point for Wednesday will be different than a comedy with Amy Schumer, Lee says. But I really think that the fans tell you what they want to see more of.
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