Surprise Release

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Advertising is important to make sure word is spread about your work. Typically, most major works have a multimillion advertising campaign behind them, with the company trying to make sure as many people as possible are convinced to buy into it. On the other end of the spectrum, there's Invisible Advertising, when the network puts little to no effort into promoting an upcoming work, usually because they're either more focused on one project over others, don't want a certain work to succeed, or believe they have a flop on their hands and want to quietly bury it.

A surprise release (sometimes known as a shadow drop) falls somewhere in between; the company is confident that a work can find success, but instead of building up to its debut with a prolonged pre-release marketing campaign, they reveal the project and subsequently announce that it's already available to buy. Whether this is due to thinking that the true appeal of the work is too hard to explain and that audiences need to experience it directly so they can "get it", because the work in question is part of an existing franchise or from a known creator with dedicated and vocal enough fanbase that the company can simply get away with the act, or some other factor, the end result is that as soon as the trailer ends, you're told you can watch/play/listen to this right now.

These kinds of works typically have been worked on in complete secrecy, often to the point that some of the involved parties don't even know of its existence until mere days, or even hours before they come out. While advertising may still exist and begin circulating to help promote the product after release, most of the marketing is arguably done more through word-of-mouth by the intrigued few (or many) who decide to immediately give it a chance.

While an extremely rare practice beforehand, surprise releases started to take off as a marketing strategy during The New '10s: after digital distribution had become the norm and made it easier than ever for consumers to access new content, and social media had reached the point where it was easier than ever to quickly spread information about said content. You'll most commonly find this occur in the fields of music and video games; especially the latter, where announcing a game's immediate release during a high-profile news event such as a Nintendo Direct isn't uncommon, as the high viewership of such livestreams or conferences by enthusiasts (numbering in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions) can garner smaller game developers far more attention than a standalone marketing campaign at far less cost.

Examples: