Get Your Cut
View the case- Brand
- Lionsgate
- Year
- 2019
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Entertainment
- Mechanic
- Puzzle
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- AvatarLabs
Objective
Knives Out was a new, non-franchise title opening into a crowded Thanksgiving weekend against blockbuster sequels. Lionsgate needed the campaign to hold audience attention for two months before release, turning passive trailer-watching into active investigation that would carry moviegoers into theaters. A $250,000 prize pool gave the marketing enough pull to reach and engage far beyond what a trailer alone could deliver.
Solution
Players land on the mobile hub getyourcut.com, where family lawyer Alan Stevens (Frank Oz, reprising his film role) lays out the terms of Harlan Thrombey's will: to claim a cut of the estate, you have to find the clues hidden in plain sight. Over the next two months, new mysteries drop several times a week — 32 in total — each one tucked inside a real piece of marketing: a trailer frame, a poster, an exclusive photo or video running on a press partner's site, a social post, even a text exchange with one of the characters. Players comb the material themselves, spot the answer, and submit it on the hub; correct answers earn sweepstakes entries, with tougher mysteries worth more entries and unlocking higher prize tiers like "Fortune" along the way. The campaign closes with a drawing for the $250,000 grand prize plus several thousand smaller awards.
Results
164,000 unique participants took part, submitting more than 200,000 sweepstakes entries, and the campaign hub logged nearly 700,000 page views over the two-month run.
- 1
The campaign launches inside the film's own advertising: trailers, posters and social posts embed clues and direct the audience to the campaign hub, getyourcut.com, to "get your cut" of a prize.
- 2
A welcome video from family lawyer Alan Stevens (Frank Oz, reprising his film role) explains the premise — Harlan Thrombey's will sets aside part of his fortune for fans — and lays out the rules; the video itself hides the first clue for players to catch.
- 3
To submit answers, the player registers an account on the hub with a full name, email and password.
- 4
The core loop: a new mystery tied to a specific piece of campaign media (a poster, social post, or an exclusive video such as a will-reading scene) goes live several times a week, 32 in total, and the player studies that material to spot a hidden clue before returning to the hub to submit the answer.
- 5
Some clues arrive by SMS instead: texting a character-specific keyword to a short code triggers an in-character reply that reveals the answer, and players can opt into an ongoing text thread with that character for extra family lore between mysteries.
- 6
Correct answers earn sweepstakes entries scaled to difficulty — one for an easy mystery, two for medium, three for hard — so tougher clues are worth more chances at the grand prize.
- 7
Each new mystery also unlocks an additional prize for the community, and rewards are organized into tiers, giving players a visible ladder of what their entries are working toward.
- 8
A prize page shows the full pool at stake: a $250,000 cash grand prize, premiere trips, hometown screenings, celebrity video messages, branded merchandise and thousands of movie tickets, over 3,000 awards in all.
- 9
Players who skip the puzzles can still enter by submitting their information directly, in exchange for a fixed, smaller number of entries.
- 10
The campaign runs on this weekly mystery cadence until its close in late November 2019, timed to the film's November 27 theatrical release, after which the grand-prize drawing is held.
