Since Mythic Quest behaves like a real company on social instead of a fake one from a TV show, the boss, David, often mistakes Instagram followers for staff. We use the channel as a direct line to speak to "employees", share internal messages and company memos. We looked to continue this trend by extending the storyline from the Christmas episode onto social involving our fans.

In the Christmas episode David announces that there will be bonuses. We extended the storyline onto social by “mistakenly” giving those bonuses out to fans instead of employees, to David’s dismay.

Our fans classically engage with the channel as if they are employees of the fictional company, we continued this trend with our activation and rewarded their loyal behavior with real Christmas bonuses.

After the episode aired, it was extended on Instagram with an update from David about the bonuses, and hundreds of fans played along in the comments. David’s assistant Jo set up calls to surprise these “employees” with bonuses. Fans were shocked and awed by personal FaceTime calls from the two stars of the show and their thousand dollar year-end surprise.

But after David surprised people, he got a surprise of his own. Jo revealed that not all the recipients were employees, but rather just people who commented on the post. While the bonuses didn’t end up in the right places, fans became part of Mythic Quest in the very best way.

The company's biggest social “mistake” became a huge social activation with 1.4 billion impressions and a 430% increase in engagement.