Traditional movie trailers and standard ads didn’t build the hype behind Obsession and Backrooms—their audiences did. By replacing predictable promotional rollouts with unhinged campaigns and intentional mystery, these 2026 hits rewrote the marketing playbook. Here is what Obsession and Backrooms can teach marketers about capturing today’s hyper-distracted consumers.

Transforming static advertising

The breakout campaigns for Obsession and Backrooms completely reinvented static advertising by turning passive billboards into living, evolving storylines.

While Obsession hooked spectators by planting handwritten billboard love notes that devolved into frantic graffiti over several days, A24’s Backrooms opted for eerie, in-universe world-building. Instead of traditional trailers, the campaign scattered classified documents from the fictional Async Research Institute and glitchy VHS snippets across the internet.

In both cases, viewers weren’t just looking at marketing materials—they were actively texting characters and getting immersed in an alternate reality before setting foot in a theater.

Community-driven narrative

Instead of forcing a corporate message onto the public, both campaigns stepped back and handed the keys to their audiences. By allowing fan theories, shared text screenshots and collective sleuthing, audiences and internet users fueled the buildup.

This shift proves exactly what Obsession and Backrooms can teach marketers about modern consumer engagement: when you stop trying to control the narrative and invite the community to create it, your advertising becomes authentic marketing. By shifting the focus from corporate pitching to collective puzzle-solving, these films turned casual scrollers into an unstoppable, self-generating publicity machine.

In a “nutt” shell 

Bottom line: by transforming passive viewers into active investigators, these films let the internet’s fascination organically drive box-office momentum. Ultimately, what Obsession and Backrooms can teach marketers is that modern consumer loyalty doesn’t always require a massive ad budget—just leverage human curiosity.

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