All The Way: My Party

The Broadway production of ALL THE WAY (produced by Jeffrey Richards, Louise Gund and Jerry Frankel) wrapped up its run at the Neil Simon Theatre on June 29th in spectacular fashion, playing to standing room only audiences and grossing over $1.6 million in ticket sales in its last week alone, an all-time record for a straight play. The packed houses served as a fitting crescendo for the show—which earlier won Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Bryan Cranston)—and for AKA NYC the entertainment marketing firm behind its innovative advertising and marketing campaign.
Written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Schenkkan, ALL THE WAY is a political drama about the passage of the Civil Rights Act during the Johnson Administration. Cranston, fresh from his Emmy Award-winning performance in the AMC television series Breaking Bad, starred as the 36th President. The show came to Broadway following a limited run last fall at Boston’s American Repertory Theater. It premiered in February, less than six months after the final episode of Breaking Bad aired on AMC.
To launch the production, AKA developed a multi-tiered advertising and marketing campaign including print, outdoor and web advertising, direct mail, social media outreach and a website. Serving as its centerpiece was a unique television ad campaign aimed at transforming some of Cranston’s legions of television fans into theater goers. “It was very much a television-driven strategy,” explains AKA Client Services Group Director Melissa Marano. “We wanted to introduce Bryan Cranston, whom television audiences knew as Walter White, as this new (real life) character, LBJ.”
AKA Broadcast Director Jamaal Parham and Executive Creative Director Bashan Aquart flew to Los Angeles in early December to shoot Cranston performing key moments from the play. Those became a carefully calibrated series of ads, the first of which broke on AMC just after Christmas during marathon screenings of Breaking Bad.
While trading on Cranston’s star power, the television spots also sought to draw viewers into the political intrigue at the heart of the play. “It has to be engaging,” says Parham. “You want people to want to be part of the story…you want to invite them to come along for the ride.”
“We made it a point to show people that this play was not a history lesson,” he adds. “Our references were House of Cards and West Wing. It’s politics as entertainment.”