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OpinionsThe team at Tubi did not set out to make a global campaign. Here's how it came about, what we make of the work, and how to build a campaign that travels on purpose.
Tubi's happy accident
"Find Any Feeling For Free" launched in September 2026. It runs on nine films in which people go to ridiculous lengths to feel something: faking a funeral, staging a meet-cute at a car crash, sprinting into the woods hoping to be abducted by aliens. Each one resolves the same way, with a nudge that they could have felt the same thing by just watching something on Tubi. It went live in the US and Canada on 10 September and Australia on 6 October, with the UK following later in the autumn.
The brief was not an international one. Tubi's CMO, Nicole Parlapiano, told LBB that the team started by asking why people choose what they watch. The answer was rarely a specific title. It was a mood. As she tells it, the idea they landed on for one market simply happened to work across several, and a global campaign followed.
Why it works, and what comes next
The campaign works because it describes a behaviour, not a preference. Whether it's a comfort sitcom after a long day or a horror film for a thrill, people across the world pick what to watch based on how they want to feel. Media psychology has a name for it: mood management. Nobody needs the central idea of the campaign explained, because almost everyone has experienced it. The films push that behaviour somewhere absurd with the lengths the characters go to, but the feelings behind them are familiar everywhere: wanting to be loved (Fakin' It), wanting romance (Meet Cute) and wanting to escape (New Identity). That is what makes an insight portable, and it is the foundation of a global campaign that is both effective and efficient: every market starts from the same place.
So far the campaign has run in four of Tubi's eleven markets. The rest include six Spanish-speaking markets (Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador and Panama) and New Zealand, and we will be watching to see whether localised Spanish assets follow. If they do, the insight should survive the journey, but the dialogue-led comedy will need rewriting for each market, not just translating, and timing is everything. The two lines carrying the campaign will need the same care.
How to design a portable idea on purpose
Tubi's insight was strong enough to travel without being designed to, which is rare. Here are five tips to build a campaign that works across markets.
1. Separate the human truth from the way you tell it, and test them separately.
The human truth is what travels. The scenario that dramatises it is what gets stuck at the border. Write the truth down as a plain statement and test that with local audiences first, then test each creative premise market by market as its own question. Ōura's "Subtle. Power." is a good example of one idea built to travel, told almost entirely without words.
2. Bring local markets in at concept, not at adaptation.
The cheapest moment to find out that a premise does not work somewhere is before it is a script. Once you're in production, the options are a reshoot or a compromise. Local teams and in-market experts earn their place at the concept stage, where they can tell you which idea to back, rather than at the end, where all they can do is tell you what has gone wrong. A disconnect between insight and creative is the single most expensive gap we see in global campaigns, and it is the cheapest one to close early.
3. Expect attitudes towards emotion to vary, and build that into the brief.
How openly people talk about feelings differs from market to market. In markets where emotion tends to be kept more private, a brand urging you to name your feelings can read as intrusive. The stronger move would be to suggest the mood through a familiar situation, a long week or a wet Sunday afternoon, and let the viewer recognise the feeling without being told what it is. That only works if each market knows what it is allowed to change. Platform, end line and brand world: fixed. The situation, casting, setting and tone: local, and briefed as such from the start. This is what a localisation playbook is for.
4. Check the lines that are working the hardest.
The lines carrying the most weight are the ones least likely to survive translation. "Find Any Feeling For Free" runs on alliteration. "Or You Could Tubi" turns the brand name into a verb, which behaves differently in every language. Both need transcreating rather than translating, and that takes time you have to plan for upfront.
5. Make sure the product can deliver the promise in every market.
This is the one most easily missed, because it sits outside the campaign. "Find Any Feeling" only works if the catalogue delivers on it, and a library that is deep in one market may be thinner in another. The same is true of what proves each feeling: comfort viewing in one market is a familiar sitcom, in another a melodrama you can cry at. The insight holds everywhere. The titles used to prove it should change market by market.
For brands building a global campaign on purpose, it comes down to three things. Local input at development, so the idea is shaped by the markets it has to work in. Clear guardrails on what stays fixed and what flexes, communicated well to every team. Plus an informed view of what requires culturalisation, so the effort goes where it makes the difference.
The Tubi team found their global idea by accident. If you would rather find yours by design, get in touch.
