Netflix’s new Black Mirror marketing strategy has had a frightening effect, with members of the public appearing on billboards around the country.
This comes after the platform seemed to alter its name to Streamberry, a reference to the current episode of Charlie Brooker’s gripping series, which incorporates a Netflix-like platform within the episodes.
In the first episode, Joan Is Awful, Annie Murphy’s character Joan watches her life unfold on Streamberry, which stars Salma Hayek.
And Netflix appears to have made it into something genuine.
Viewers were urged to upload images of themselves and ‘join the Streamberry family,’ only to discover that they had been cast in a drama.
Netflix stated some viewers are reportedly being aired throughout the country by sharing a succession of self-uploaded photographs made into a ‘Joan Is Awful’ like image.
It follows a warning to read the ‘terms and conditions’ after viewing Joan Is Awful.
‘#YouAreAwful is creepy AF!’ one person penned, while another wrote: ‘This is too far.’
Someone else said: ‘How creepy would it be to see yourself on a billboard? Watched Joan is Awful last night and it was trippy!’
Others were definitely on board though, with one warning: ‘Do me next or I take a baseball bat to the quantum computer.’
The episode saw ‘ordinary lady’ Joan discover that her life had been surprisingly grown into a massive adaption, all because she didn’t read the fine print.
As Joan attempts to recover control over her secrets being revealed on a massive streaming platform, mayhem follows, only for her to discover a startling twist that has her rethinking all of her decisions.
Brooker has stated that the episode was inspired in part by a genuine event.
He told us: ‘Joan is Awful this season, I had half an idea which was, is there a story about… the title for some reason stuck in my head.
‘And I was thinking, is there a story about an average woman who finds herself on the front page of the newspaper?
‘She’s the lead item on the news – not because she’s involved in a terrible scandal, or she’s done something heroic, but just she’s like, [the] main character of the day, her co-workers don’t like the way she chews her food or something minor like that. I was like, I don’t know what the story is, but it’s a funny situation.’
He continued: ‘There’s another idea… which was to do [with] like deep fake AI generated imagery being streamed by a news network. But I didn’t know what to do with either of these ideas. So you’ve got an idea, but you don’t have a story.
‘And then I was watching The Dropout, which is the dramatisation of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos story, and I was watching that with my wife and we were sort of commenting on like, god, this feels like it happened yesterday, and here it is already a drama on TV.’
He explained that those two ‘half ideas’ were suddenly ‘sucked up into this one’.
Black Mirror is now available to watch on Netflix.