Social innovation | Shortland Street | Summer Fling
Project date: December 2010
Letting Kiwis have a summer fling with their fave Shorty character
New Zealanders love the soap opera Shortland Street. But how do you keep fans hooked on the show while it’s off-air over summer?
During the summer of 2010, we turned their fantasies into reality, letting them start an online relationship with their favourite Shortland Street character over Facebook. All summer long, they received a stream of flirty messages, pics, videos and emails from their Summer Fling, personalised for them, as if it were a real life relationship.
Summer Fling TVC
TV ads directed fans to the Summer Fling Facebook app where they found profiles of the characters, including video clips where they met the characters face-to-face. From there, fans chose who they wanted to ‘hook up’ with. And they could set up their friends with a fling too.
The content strategy
Every single piece of Summer Fling content was carefully crafted in the right tone of voice for each character and took into consideration their back stories and the current on-air plot.
A comprehensive conversation calendar ensured messages deployed at specific moments throughout summer, coinciding with Christmas and New Year’s Eve, for instance. And we revealed little teasers for the upcoming season along the way.
Your Summer Fling wrapped up with a break up email by the end of summer, returning the Shortland Street world to normal and hooking you back into the show's cliffhanger plot-line ready for episode one.
By extending the world of Shortland Street on the Facebook platform, we offered fans a highly-personalised, interactive experience with the show. The additional content created an online ‘parallel universe’ for the show that kept fans returning all summer long.
Fans participated in constructing the Summer Fling narrative by replying and sharing content, with some fans even going as far as creating and posting their own photo and video content!
Results
200% increase in fan interaction on the Shortland Street Facebook page
271% increase in traffic to the page
31% growth in daily ‘Likes’ on the page
50% of our target market tuned in to watch the first episode of Shortland Street in 2011
Featured in Facebook Studio's Agency Spotlight: Creative Showcase 2011, and won several local awards.
