The Boys Marketing Team Is Surreal In Their Efficacy

The true charm of the Vought International YouTube channel comes from the comment section.

Check it out. 

You’ll encounter a level of kayfabe reserved for top tier professional wrestlers. Everyone is commenting as if this content was really real in our universe. For the life of me I’m not sure if it’s bots, several employees on a bunch of accounts or a fanbase just down to play along. 

The comments will either reference recent events in the show, other YouTube videos on the channel or lore & history scattered throughout The Boys universe.

What’s important is that there are well over 1000 comments per video, believably from people that live in a world where they’d be following Vought International for news. 

Instead of trailers they decided to create news summaries spoofing majour news networks

The earliest videos are newscasts that recap what happened on the previous episode of The Boys.

Newsman Cameron Coleman would report on what happened in an episode, adding flavour as if Fox or MSNBC was reporting on real world events. It was brilliantly executed and served as a trailer for what’s next. By watching it you’d get rewarded with a little more lore and behind the scenes info that wouldn’t exist anywhere else.

Most importantly it was delivered as if Cameron was speaking directly to a person who lives in the The Boys universe.

This level of believability made the content super enjoyable. 

Inevitably it evolved into short videos, featuring the heroes of the 7, and Ashley, creating propaganda and other entertainment.

It’s exactly what you would expect given how the show presents Vought’s relationship with social media. 

The comments feel like you’re in a parallel universe

You scroll down to the comment section of any video, and it’s just a bunch of random accounts, clearly fake, that are just commenting on the video. 

Every single one is related to the video, or some stereotype that exists in the universe. Here are an example on a music video released by The Deep & Firecracker from season 4:

• @NCR_Saucer: When I was sixteen my 15 year old best friend got to meet firecracker during our Bible camp! I’m still so Jealous!!!

• @soxpeewee: I feel like Firecracker and The Deep have both touched so many people!

• In response to @soxpeewee, we have @animalfinatic9366 saying: people and sealife alike

At the top level you have this vapid support for the stars of the video. Then you dig in the comments and find people pointing out how The Deep likes to fuck sea creatures. While it gets repetitive, so do real YouTube comments.

I’d put money down that this is AI generated. The team running this is slick with it, making sure their dummy accounts follow other ones. It gives the appearance of reality. 

They keep the story alive across all social media platforms

On Instagram, the Vought team has held it down, making sure that the top comments all look like they are within The Boys universe.

X.com is a little more fun. The folk interacting with Vought over on X are a mix of the botted fake accounts and real people calling out the promo. However, you can see real people playing along too.

The people who watch The Boys and Gen V all understand what’s happening in these comments. I believe that the community is on board. While the bulk of interactions are fake, I think as time goes on, more and more people play along. 

There may come a day where thousands of fans sincerely create fake content to keep the joke alive.

Either way this team is a great example of how to create culture, lore and be interesting with it. 

Take notes young padawans.

Live Long and Prosper Everyone