“I was wrong and I want to genuinely ask for your forgiveness. In this case, I didn’t include you early enough,” he continued. “We should have told you from the beginning what we’re planning to do, and that the billboards being defaced were ours, so that that period of time where you were confused or surprised or shocked or upset that that didn’t end up making you feel like we were trying to trick you. We were not at all trying to trick you. We were not trying to play with your emotions or anything. This was solely directed towards a new audience that hadn’t seen the show yet, trying to get them intrigued. And in the process, we overlooked you, our most important partner, and that was wrong.”
While Jenkins expressed regret for not including fans in the show’s misleading marketing campaign, he said that “The Chosen” is seeing an increase in new viewership as a result of the ads. Derral Eves, co-founder and executive producer of “The Chosen,” joined Jenkins to share how he personally saw their satirical Devil video reach a younger audience, intriguing them to watch “The Chosen.”
Eves and a coworker were at a Chick-fil-A watching the video when a dad who overheard them talking told them that it wasn’t a very smart idea to have a campaign featuring the Devil in the Bible belt. Eves shared that the dad’s teenage son re-situated himself in the booth in order to view the video and started laughing at the jokes. The boy then asked his dad if they could download the app.
That interaction then led to an hour conversation about Jesus between the four. Eves said the dad texted him later and told him they not only downloaded the app but started binge watching the show.
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“This marketing strategy of this reverse psychology is one of the most effective ways to pull that Generation Z in to grab their attention,” Eves said regarding the show, which was conceived and created by a multi-faith team that ranges from Mormon adherents to evangelicals.
Eves then told a story about a mother who shared that her teenaged daughter grabbed the phone from her “when she started seeing the ad and was laughing and it,” later becoming interested in the show.
The show’s goal is to reach a billion people and that “involves many different kinds of audiences. One of the things that in the app, the feature of the ad, is the devil wrestling with the fact that this Jesus that we’re portraying is authentic and impacting people. And he’s like, ‘It’s different from the other Jesuses that have been portrayed in movies and TV’ that were keeping people from knowing the authentic Jesus,” Eves said.
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Eves concluded, “We’re thinking outside the box, but we’re hitting new eyeballs in in a unique way of really bringing them in to see an authentic Jesus. So I’m really excited about this.”
