Creating an immersive experience for BBC Three's drama series "Thirteen"

1. Supporting
BBC Three’s Thirteen
Thirteen Lost Years and #FindtheGirl
digitalguerrillas@bbc.co.uk
bbcdigitalguerrillas.co.uk

2. The challenge
Thirteen was BBC Three’s first new
drama since moving online.
The challenge – how could we provide
an enhanced audience experience as
part of the new BBC Three, using social
media, Daily Drop, and Best Of as well
as iPlayer?

3. Thirteen Lost Years
Thirteen: Lost Years was a personalisation project that
showed you the events from your life you would have
missed if you had been kidnapped for 13 years like Ivy
Moxham.
It was produced to raise awareness of the show before it
was released while introducing the themes and concept
of Thirteen.

4. Thirteen #findthegirl
#findthegirl was a parallel story set in the
world of Thirteen. It played out on social
media and Tumlbr and was curated on
BBC Three’s Best Of & Daily Drop sites.

5. The #findthegirl brief
#FindtheGirl was designed to run alongside
Thirteen’s weekly release schedule in order to:
•Support the launch of BBC Three’s first major
online drama
•Deepen audience engagement with
the show
•Maintain audience interest between weekly
episode releases

6. The concept
• Use marketing budget to create online drama content
• Tell a five-week story on social media between episodes
• Create a character that ‘exists’ online on social media that can communicate
with the audience
• Create digital experiences the audience could interact with
• Create video to make the character compelling

7. The story
When a young girl is kidnapped, wannabe
journalist Sarah Hays decides to
investigate herself
But she needs the help of the audience to
find her as she finds clues, chases leads
and hacks websites for information
Over five weeks of the shows release
schedule, the audience can follow Sarah
and help her solve the mystery

8. Digital experiences, video and social content
INTERACTIVE VIDEO
TWITTER BLOG

9. Experienced across social, desktop and mobile

10. Collaboration was key
• Unique collaboration between Digital Guerrillas, BBC
Three, and Thirteen TV production which began at
script stage
• Thirteen creator Marnie Dickens wrote all scripts for
#Findthegirl
• Thirteen TV production supported #findthegirl with
locations, art department and additional support
• Crossover: The actress playing our character was
featured in the main show, while actors from the main
show featured in #findthegirl

11. Results
• Created a fan community around Thirteen
• Gave fans a focal point for discussion
• Provided addtional content, entertainment &
talking points for Thirteen
• Bridged the gap between episode releases
• Gave BBC Three a new way to promote the show
without consistently repeating themselves

12. Created a positive perception of BBC Three online

13. Increased engagement with the show

14. Fostered a community of fans

15. Created an identifiable character and emotional link

16. Short Form Drama – Mirrored the Longform

17. Engaged a young social media led audience
As we moved through the story, the
audience challenged us…
•We underestimated how dedicated our
audience would be
•Smart, engaged, capable, social,
tech-savvy
•We had to create reactive content
on-the-fly to satisfy their desire for
more content

18. Who were our audience?
• Devotees read every update, solved
every puzzle and posted frequently
• Active players participate often in the
game but less immediate
• Casual players enjoy the experience
without contributing
• Lurkers dip in and out of the story

19. Who were our audience?
• Aimed for females aged 16-24
• 79% of Twitter followers were female
• 21% of Twitter followers were male
• 81% of Twitter users tweets reached
organically were female
• Ages of followers appeared to
range from 16-24, especially
within the devotee audience

20. Thirteen on iPlayer
• Exceptional iPlayer views, opening with
2.2 million for Episode 1
• Episode 4 beat Eastenders to
the no.2 most requested show
on iPlayer
• Final episode got 370k requests during
its first full day
• All episodes featured in the top 10 during
their first full week on iPlayer
iPlayer views
(to 31 March 2016)
Ep 1 = 2.20m
Ep 2 = 1.86m
Ep 3 = 1.67m
Ep 4 = 1.49m
Ep 5 = 1.04m

21. #findthegirl on social media
• Almost 700,000 tweet impressions
• 7,000 link clicks
• 25,000 impressions of a single
tweet at key story moment
• Tweet engagement as high as
22% (standard closer to 1-2% - a
highly engaged following)
• 1000 comments on the blog –
258 in one day
Our Twitter account with no pre-promotion before the first episode achieved:

22. #findthegirl web traffic
• 1,272,576 pageviews
• 356,864 uniques
Thirteen programme page
• 140,804 pageviews
• 43,710 uniques
All #findthegirl websites

23. Recommendations on enhancing TV Dramas online
• Effective promotion before and during
the campaign
• Audience targeting and seeding
• Reactive editorial content
• Interactive digital content
• Independence from weekly TV
release schedule

24. What did it cost?
Including estimates for staff
–£120k
using existing BBC platform –
£7K

25. digitalguerrillas@bbc.co.uk
bbcdigitalguerrillas.co.uk