The marketing campaign for The Purge began with a question that felt like a dare. The film imagined one night a year when every crime was legal. Brigade, working with Universal Pictures, asked moviegoers to stop observing that premise from a safe distance: Would you survive the night? It was a small grammatical turn with large consequences. The audience was no longer hearing about a movie. It was being recruited into one.
Brigade built propaganda posters, fake public-service warnings, countdowns, question cards, animated GIFs, and social prompts around that idea. Fans answered, argued, joked, made their own hashtags, and created character accounts. On release day, #ifthepurgewashappeninginreallife trended. A campaign had escaped the campaign calendar and become a game people played with one another.
The film opened at number one. Brigade and Universal won a Shorty Award for animated GIFs, including a nine-panel "cinemosaic" that fused poster art with moving clips. The most interesting result was not that a GIF collected more than 64,000 notes, though it did. It was that the campaign found a piece of the movie audiences could carry away and use. The content did not summarize the plot. It preserved the tension.
“The idea of ‘what would you do’ became the central focus.”The Purge campaign account
The trailer was not the strategy
Movie marketing often arrives as an orderly pile of assets: poster, trailer, cast interview, review quote, countdown. Brigade's work suggests a harder assignment. Find the behavior hiding inside the story. For The Purge, that behavior was speculation. People naturally wanted to ask whom they would trust, where they would hide, and what ordinary life would look like the morning after. Brigade turned those instincts into formats suited to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.
That distinction matters because distribution is not the same as participation. A trailer can be placed in front of millions of people. It cannot make them care. Brigade's campaign gave viewers a role, a vocabulary, and a public place to perform both. The media spend for the agency's portion of the campaign was not published, so its useful lesson is not a budget ratio. It is the sequence: premise first, audience behavior second, format third.
Four desks, one nervous system
Brigade is a New York business-to-business agency, not a consumer app and not a production studio. Its customers are the people with something to release: film studios, streamers, television networks, distributors, filmmakers, festivals, and production companies. The public client list includes Universal, Netflix, Disney, Hulu, Focus Features, United Artists, Amazon, CBS, IFC Films, Lionsgate, Warner Bros., A24, ABC, Sony, and Prime Video.
The service menu has four broad parts. Digital marketing covers social strategy, community management, listening, live coverage, analytics, and media buying. Digital creative covers concepts, scripts, storyboards, graphics, animation, video, sound, ads, and sites. Digital publicity handles interviews, influencers, Q&As, events, and outreach. National publicity handles the old, durable machinery of releases, junkets, critics, festivals, screenings, trades, and red carpets.
One release idea, four connected disciplines
Many competitors can perform each task. Brigade's claim is about the handoff. A publicist hears which part of a film reporters find interesting. A social team sees which joke or fear fans repeat. A designer turns that reaction into another asset. A media planner decides what deserves amplification. When those people share the same brief, the campaign can learn while it is still alive.
The company arrived with Oscar season
Tom Cunha, Adam Kersh, and Jean McDowell founded Brigade in 2010. Their résumés made the proposition legible: digital marketing, traditional publicity, and social strategy in one three-person firm. They opened with more than a dozen distributors in the early client mix and work attached to Rabbit Hole, For Colored Girls, Inside Job, and Tiny Furniture. This was not a garage waiting for product-market fit. It was a small room full of specialists who already knew the release calendar.
Launch. Three founders combine publicity, digital marketing, and social strategy.
The Purge. A fan prompt grows into organic conversation and a number-one opening.
Transition. Kersh leaves; Cunha takes oversight of digital marketing and publicity.
Range. The portfolio spans A24 horror, ABC reality, studio film, streaming, and animation.
The first obvious stress test was leadership, not technology. Kersh, who ran traditional publicity, left in 2019. Cunha continued across the digital and publicity sides. The agency did not narrow itself to the newer discipline. Its current offering still includes press days, festival representation, reviews, and trade outreach beside social listening and optimization. The change reinforced the original bet: new channels do not eliminate old ones; they make coordination more valuable.
Brigade now describes itself as a pop-culture-savvy team, and its hiring language is unusually revealing. It asks for hands-on, ego-light people who can present a deck, understand an audience, track platforms, contribute to a brainstorm, and make an edit. That is less a list of jobs than a picture of agency economics. The product is judgment under a deadline, sold through project work and ongoing client relationships. Public rate cards are absent because the shape of the work changes with the release.
A useful theft
The part worth copying is not "make a GIF" or "start a hashtag." Those were formats of their moment. Copy the diagnostic. Ask what unfinished action the story creates in a viewer's mind. A mystery invites theories. A competition invites picks. A horror premise invites survival plans. Then create a small number of artifacts that make that action easy, recognizable, and public.
Reduce the property to a question people can answer without having seen it.
Let press reaction and community behavior reshape the next creative unit.
Coordinate long-lead publicity with real-time social and paid amplification.
Participation fails when the premise is generic, the answer feels risky, or approval cycles cannot move.
The approach also depends on conditions Brigade's best-known case happened to satisfy. The Purge had a one-sentence premise, an audience fluent in internet jokes, and a fictional world elastic enough for fan invention. A quiet drama, regulated brand, or campaign with no capacity to respond quickly may need a different engine. Integration cannot rescue a weak idea. It can only prevent a good one from being lost between departments.
That is Brigade's place in the market. It sits between large entertainment companies and fragmented attention, translating one release into press coverage, moving images, community conversation, and paid reach. The work is not to shout the title five ways. It is to find the one piece of the title people might willingly repeat.