Meanwhile turned to knitting to promote The Thursday Murder Club
The ad agency also utilised knitwear/diving god Tom Daley to build excitement for the release of the ‘cosy’ crime drama on Netflix
Last month, the screen adaptation of Richard Osman’s bestselling novel The Thursday Murder Club arrived on Netflix. To promote the film’s release – which features a star-studded cast including Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley – Manchester-based creative agency Meanwhile was commissioned to develop an unconventional new campaign.
Looking to bring together the cosy crime thriller with the global streaming platform in “a way we’d never seen before”, Meanwhile devised a special billboard campaign that captures the essence of the story not through images, but through intricately-knitted designs.
With the help of Dentsu Posterscope, the agency installed handcrafted, textile billboards across major stations throughout the UK, including Kings Cross and Birmingham New Street, which announced the arrival of the much-anticipated film.
Meanwhile then enlisted the help of gifted knitters around the country to create postbox toppers – which are now a common feature across villages in the UK – to promote the film. Featuring a dripping piece of cake with a knife through the middle and the ominous line, ‘don’t get too cosy’, the toppers were then ‘yarnbombed’ across towns around the UK, alerting passers-by to the film’s arrival in a way befitting of its theme. These were then accompanied by a cover wrap of local town and village newspapers in the same areas.
Finally, for some celebrity endorsement, Meanwhile reached out to British Olympic champion diver (and knitting enthusiast) Tom Daley to knit a Thursday Murder Club-themed jumper as part of the campaign. The cleverly-crafted piece features the symbolic slice of cake on the front, with a detachable knife inside, and the film’s title on the reverse.
Daley then showcased the design on his Instagram account to hundreds of thousands of followers, adding to the widely shared posts about the postbox toppers, which underlined the local, small-town feel of the film while taking the campaign global.
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