How This Agency Made Netflix’s Eerie Booth for Altered Carbon the Breakout Star at CES

Psychasec was billed as a radical new technology that promotes immortality and included actors that played spokespeople dressed in all white who encouraged attendees to sign up and swap out their consciousness to be placed in another body. Working with agency Kamp Grizzly, Netflix created a presence at CES—including a booth and social media campaign—for the fake tech company Psychasec that appears in Netflix’s new show Altered Carbon, which is based on Richard K. Morgan’s novel, that begins streaming on Feb. 2. Immersive theater experiences like Sleep No More, an experience put on by New York hotel McKittrick Hotel, inspired the stunt.

“When we came into this project, I was like ‘Gig’s going to be up really soon—30 minutes in, everyone is going to know that it’s Netflix,’” said Luke Yablonsky, art director at Kamp Grizzly. “But that proved wrong. People believed it all week long.”

Misdirection, a key component of many of Las Vegas’ magic shows, played a big role in Netflix’s success. For one, Psychasec didn’t appear on CES’ list of exhibitors (though Netflix was listed). But more noticeably, two toned and fit mannequins appeared in glass cases at the entrance of the booth and were viewable from the show floor.

“At CES, you’re going to see a lot of companies with technologies that you’re not sure what it does or how it works—they’re kind of predicting the future of what things might do,” Yablonsky said. “We were constantly pushing the intersection of confusion.”

After making their way past the mannequins, attendees could learn more about Psychasec’s technology that transports consciousness into another body, which are called sleeves and see a test body wrapped in a body bag, which people could touch. After viewing the body bag, a trailer for Altered Carbon played, displaying the Netflix logo on the booth.

“We didn’t have Panosonic money or Samsung money,” said Dushane Ramsay, strategist and account director at Kamp Grizzly, referencing the huge budgets that tech companies spend at CES. “We knew that if we didn’t stick hard to this forced reality idea, the impact was just going to be too soft. In two seconds you would figure out what it is and keep going.”

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To push the narrative even further, Kamp Grizzly created an 18-page lookbook explaining how Psychasec’s technology works, a flash website where people could sign up for more information, social posts and a fake press release.

“The more confusion and the more that people started to say, ‘Oh no, I think I know what this is’ and then we hit them with something else that was more confusing—that’s where we wanted to drive this thing,” said Yablonsky. “A lot of our thinking was how much of a backstory we could create through fake websites, fake information, a fake press release.”

Playing up humans as guinea pigs in the technology added a layer of eeriness to the activation.

“We wanted to start this conversation that’s sometimes uncomfortable about the future of living,” Ramsay said. “Initially when we started, we wanted the bodies to be completely naked but with the convention rules we had to find where the delicate balance was.”

Yablonsky added, “CES was a little shook by that idea.”

Of course, CES and the event organizers were in on the stunt, but the bizarre activation managed to continually keep people confused and entertained.

Netflix doubled down on obfuscation, creating a “protest” outside the venue, with forty-some actors hired from Improv Everywhere pretending to riot against the ethical concerns about Psychasec. The agency created pamphlets, buttons and stickers for the protesters and also drove a truck around Las Vegas with a digital billboard on the side that read, “Boycott #Psychasec. Say no to lab-grown bodies.”

“We came up with this idea of ‘Well, if people really went to CES, what if people thought this was wrong,” said Yablonsky. “Groups will have problems with any new type of technology, especially with a human—this is like animal rights on speed.”

To cap off the story, Kamp Grizzly destroyed its booth at one point during the week, vandalizing it with spray paint and stickers to look like someone had broken into the Las Vegas Convention Center in the middle of the night.

“People from other booths thought our booth really did get destroyed and someone broke in; people from CES were trying to clean our booth at one point and we just kind of kept up the story and kept distributing the literature,” Yablonsky said. “It was funny because it was creating this nice secondary layer—it really pushes that crossover to forced reality.”

While some people picked up on Netflix’s branding and involvement behind the booth, there were still people who thought Psychasec was real. After all, CES if full of future-forward ideas that consumers will never see.

“I walked by an old woman who was asking about memories and if memories are going to be kept [during the process of downloading your consciousness] and I was like, ‘Oh no—if she doesn’t go to the back [of the booth], the show is going to be way too real for her,’” Ramsay said. “There were some people who thought that maybe this really was a super beta version of a new technology. And then there were people who were like ‘Oh I get it’ or ‘I heard about this thing.’”