The 2013 season finale of NZ soap opera, Shortland Street, was an explosive cliffhanger that left viewers in doubt over which characters would live or die. The brief: keep viewers talking about the show whilst it was off-air for five weeks, and drive eyeballs to relaunch in January 2014.
We created an interactive transmedia clue hunt to encourage viewers to speculate. For 34 consecutive days, clues were released at midnight. They ranged from news reports, text messages between characters, videos, anagrams, audio recordings, and emails. We saw fantastic engagement figures across the 34 days of the campaign. The 2014 return episode was the highest rating premiere in over a decade with a 53.5% audience share. There were an average of 17,000 visits to the site per day, 4.5 minutes on average spent per visit, 6,840,900 total reach on Facebook, and over 3 million page views.