Squid Games and Mr. Beast

Squid Games became a cultural sensation in a matter of weeks after its release on Netflix. The South Korean TV series revolves around a competition for money in games where players win or die rapidly became a smash hit. Not only was it successful with critics, but the show was also streamed in homes around the world. Netflix never releases exact numbers, but according to CNET, the show was their biggest ever, with subscribers worldwide collectively watching more than 2.1 billion hours of the show.

Squid Games was a breakout hit that took over social media. On TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, you could find countless posts revolving around the show. The costumes and aesthetic became wildly popular, spawning Halloween costumes, merchandise, and more. Squid Games was unquestionably a smashing success that became a cultural touchstone.

One creator that took the most advantage of this trend was Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast is one of the biggest social media influencers around right now. He has roughly 87 million subscribers on his YouTube channel and nearly 180 million across platforms. He has received billions of views and is one of the most high-powered content creators around.

Mr. Beast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, is a 23-year-old whose fame is centered around his videos’ expensive stunts and comedy. Right in the middle of the Squid Games craze, Mr. Beast decided to capitalize on Squid Game’s cultural cachet by creating a Squid Games video.

To do this, he recruited Brawl Stars, a mobile game, to fund his video, and he created a painstaking recreation of the show’s sets. He then recruited 456 competitors to play in non-lethal versions of the show’s games, with the winner receiving prize money of $456,000. This video used the same aesthetic and costumes of the show and the same concepts but in a real-world setting. It was a massive, unprecedented hit.

The 25-minute video Mr. Beast created will go down as one of the great examples of influencer marketing. While extremely expensive to put together and a massive risk, Mr. Beast’s video has generated just under 200 million views in slightly over a month since it was posted. It has 12 million likes and shows some content creators’ limitless potential for putting together truly creative products.

With Brawl Stars helping with a significant investment fund, Mr. Beast put together a YouTube video, unlike anything that has ever been done before. While he utilized a major trend, this creator took something that started as South Korean content but grew to become a global phenomenon and put his unique creativity to work to add to the show’s wide-reaching impact.

Major Takeaways

There are many different major takeaways you can pull from this event. For starters, the power of trends on social media can’t be overstated. Mr. Beast used the trendiness and imagery of one of the biggest TV shows of all time and leveraged it to benefit his channel. This shows how important it is for brands and relevant influencers to focus on what is popular with their content.

The key takeaway from this has to be the benefit of trusting the right influencer and how important it is to take a big swing. From the perspective of Brawl Stars, funding this video was a risk. Yes, Mr. Beast is a big influencer, one of the most important mega-influencers on the planet. But what he was trying to do was risky, something big, something unprecedented. Brawl Stars put their trust and significant amounts of money into this project and trusted that Mr. Beast’s creative juice would yield results.

For Mr. Beast, the video was unquestionably a success. It cemented him as the biggest and boldest content creator on YouTube, someone who was willing to take a swing that many others wouldn’t. For Brawl Stars, the video also yielded significant results.

According to Sensor Tower, Mr. Beast’s video yielded a 4.5x increase in US downloads for the app. On November 23^rd, there were 16,00 downloads of the app in the US. The video came out on November 24^th, and there were 51,000 downloads. The next day, there were 59,000 downloads. Player spending drastically increased week-to-week following the release of the video as well. It surged 54 percent worldwide to $8.2 million and 65% to $2 million in the US.

This is an influencer example they should be teaching in textbooks. Brawl Stars went all-in on a creator’s vision and financed his idea. The result was a massive smashing success for both the creator and the brand, a unique and special video. Mr. Beast leveraged the major success of Squid Games to create an awe-inspiring video with a massive scope. It led to Brawl Stars receiving a huge boost in both downloads and spending for the app.

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