“This is a clever way to drive tune-in and feed fans for a television premiere. I love that they included the script notes—you couldn’t get that anywhere else.” —juror Ginny Golden
“An original and beautiful use of mainstream tools to create curiosity and deconstruct linear, long-format storytelling into a poetic world of social media.” —juror Tali Krakowsky
Overview: During the three days leading up to the premiere of TNT’s new show Mob City, Deutsch NY shared every word of the pilot episode script, 140 characters at a time. A dedicated microsite, mobscript.com, pulled in the tweets in real time, so visitors could read them sequentially and catch the entire story. Fans retweeted every script tweet, so the Mob City pilot reached more than 42 million people before it even aired.
• Photos and GIFs were inserted directly into tweets using Twitter Cards.
• The project was developed over three months by a team of about 40 people.
• Twitter activity around Mob City increased thirteenfold, @MobCityTNT followers increased fivefold and 89 percent of the script tweets led to a social conversation.
Comments by Kamran Aslam, Sasha Blejec and Jennifer McBride:
Describe any special interactive features. “Mobscript.com pulled in real-time script tweets in chronological order, alongside commentary tweeted by the cast and the director. We built a custom scheduler for this project using C#, a Windows service that synchronized the data between mobscript.com and Twitter. On the microsite, vertical scrolling navigated through the entire pilot episode, and horizontal scrolling captured the buzz around each individual tweet, showing behind-the-scenes photos and videos that fans would never see otherwise.”
Is the audience you were targeting a particularly difficult one to reach? “No, but it’s a very different experience to start a conversation with fans rather than consumers. We wanted to build something that not only heightened their viewing experience, but also gave them something of value that celebrated their fandom. The show was a passion project for the cast and crew. Capturing the spirit and detail that went into the production and sharing it with fans, rather than just selling it to them, made this a really rewarding experience.”
Were there any specific demands that made the project easier or harder? “We started off with a definite end goal in mind, but executing an idea solely through a social platform required us to stay on our toes and remain flexible with how we would get there. Twitter is constantly in flux, executing back-end changes on a day-to-day basis, so we had to be comfortable with constant adaptations and fast-paced problem solving—with a very hard launch date at the end of it all. It brought each individual department’s strengths to light, connecting all aspects of the agency in a very real way.”
