Months before Kevin James sat alone in a sea of empty Super Bowl seats clutching a white bouquet, a marketing agency and Angel Studios were quietly building the internet a character it didn't know it needed.
That agency was Influenceable. The character was Matt Taylor, a fictional persona portrayed by James and seeded across TikTok and Instagram in the months leading up to Super Bowl LX. The goal was to blur the line between Kevin James the celebrity and Matt Taylor the romantic lead in Angel Studios' film Solo Mio, and to make the internet argue about which one was real.
It worked.
"We engineered the confusion intentionally," the agency said in campaign materials. Influenceable built the Matt Taylor account to 1 million TikTok followers and 579,000 Instagram followers, generating 143 million impressions and 11.5 million engagements across 78 posts in five months.
Trending topics, including "kevin james admitting he's matt taylor" and "Kevin James Reacts to Matt Taylor," emerged organically—a direct result of the algorithmic groundwork the agency had been laying since before production wrapped.
The Super Bowl stunt was the live activation. James appeared at Levi's Stadium in a dark suit, bouquet in hand, surrounded by 11 deliberately empty seats—a visual designed for screenshots, speculation and sharing. Influenceable had more than 100 creators and accounts on standby to clip, post and amplify the moment in real time across entertainment, sports and culture pages.
The internet obliged. Within a 96-hour execution window, the stunt generated 293 million direct impressions, 14 million engagements and a 4.8% engagement rate across 548 active posts. Coverage landed in Variety, Complex, Barstool Sports and The Express Tribune, among others, producing more than 1,892 article mentions.
Perhaps the sharpest measure of the campaign's cultural penetration came six weeks before the Super Bowl: during peak activity, searches for Kevin James outranked Avatar: Fire and Ash—a film backed by a reported $150 million-plus P&A budget—on Google Trends. During the Super Bowl window specifically, Solo Mio surpassed both Warner Bros.' Wuthering Heights and Sony Pictures' Goat in search volume, despite those films carrying estimated P&A budgets between $30 million and $60 million.
For Angel Studios, whose distribution model has long prioritized community over convention, the stunt was less an experiment than a confirmation.
The bouquet was a prop. The billion impressions were not.
Following a successful theatrical launch, Solo Mio has already proven that unconventional marketing can translate into real-world momentum.
