The Flemish online series wtFOCK is more popular than 'Riverdale' and 'Pretty Little Liars'. That's what producer Telenet states, based on its own research. 28 percent of young people between 15 and 34 years old have followed the second season. Impressive, because the makers made it a code of honor to hardly do any promo.

28 percent of Flemish youngsters follow 'wtFOCK', the 'Telenet' youth series. That's the most remarkable data point from the survey the company carried out among 2,666 people between 15 and 34 years old. To give you an idea of ​​what that means: within that group of respondents more people watch or watched 'Friends' (39 percent) and 'Game of Thrones' (33 percent), but fewer international hits such as 'Sex Education' (28 percent), 'Riverdale' (26 percent), 'Pretty Little Liars' (24%) and 'You' (16 percent). The same story when it comes to just knowing series: 'Friends' (76 percent of the respondents know it) and 'GoT' (73 percent) in the lead, 'wtFOCK' (63 percent) on stage and the rest behind with 55 percent or less.

For those who have never heard of the series: it's a Flemish variant of 'SKAM', a teen series of the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK that ran four seasons and caused a craze, with stories straight from the world of Norwegian youth about racism, sex and nude photos. To make the scenarios credible, the makers interviewed loads of young people, something they also did at 'wtFOCK'.

Just like 'SKAM', 'wtFOCK' couldn't be initially seen on a tv channel - only later the reruns on VIER and VIJF followed - but online in some kind of real-time scenes. If a scene took place during the lunch break, then the fragment - in terms of duration usually between thirty seconds and five minutes - also appeared online. Meanwhile, the series lived on on Instagram and Snapchat, where the characters acted like real people and interacted with the fans. At the end of the week, a compilation of the different scenes was released in an episode for those who prefer to see everything at once. FYI: in Flanders, half of the viewers watch 'wtFOCK' in real time, the other half watch the compilations.

Influencers and sidewalk chalk

It's no coincidence that Telenet is just now introducing 'viewing figures'. The third season of 'wtFOCK' will start within a few days. Nobody knows when it will start exactly. That says a lot about how Telenet and production house Sputnik won souls for the series in the past year: step by step and without major advertising campaigns in newspapers or magazines.

'In the weeks before 'wtFOCK' started, we put a few clips and trailers online and pushed those videos to teenagers via Facebook and Instagram,' Ils Neuts, head of entertainment at Telenet, tells Knack Focus this week. 'We've also worked with influencers and had some characters appear in their posts. There was a small campaign with sidewalk chalk in Antwerp [...] And the rest was simply word of mouth. '

That explains why only 42 percent of the 26-34 year olds know 'wtFOCK' compared to 72 percent of the teenagers who took part in the survey. At the same time, the same figures show that approach has worked: a quarter of the respondents say they know 'wtFOCK' through friends or family, 24 percent through a TV spot and 19 percent through Instagram, where the series account at the time of writing has nearly 99,000 followers.

The characters also have their own Instagram accounts - 81 percent of the viewers follow at least one of them - on which they post how they go to concerts or buy second-hand clothes. Whatever the actors do in real life. 'If, say, the character Zoë says she is going to a concert of Angèle that night, then we let her go to that concert in real life and post photos on Instagram,' says Neuts. Rutger Beckers from Sputnik adds: 'Skam already did that to a certain extent, but with 'wtFOCK' we have indeed gone even further.'

Text: © The editorial staff