The Situation: M. Night Shyamalan's Servant is a psychological thriller filled with as much mystery and madness as Shyamalan's acclaimed films. As the show entered season 2, it did so with a rabid base of core fans, who had been spending the past year connecting in digital and social spaces like Reddit, Facebook groups, Instagram and Twitter, theorizing about the answers to the show's biggest mysteries. While much of our season 2 marketing budget was allocated for new fan engagement, our core, season fans were our most vocal advocates- and we needed to show them they were appreciated.

The Brief: Create a digital fan experience to directly serve the needs of core fans.

Objectives: Core fan engagement; engagement rate, experience uses and conversation sentiment.

Create the most unapologetically difficult "game" the core fandom of M. Night Shyamalan's Servant could imagine; born from our show's menacing narrative.

We called it Survive The Attic. This game/ immersive experience lived digitally on experience.apple, and drew from the visual language, tone, and narrative elements of the show to create a series of 9 increasingly difficult, and visually distinct, puzzles for fans.

In Servant Season 2, a lead character, Leanne, is abducted and trapped in the Turner's attic. Every evening at 2 AM, Dorothy Turner visits Leanne, attempting to torture her into giving her information.

Based on this integral plot point, we created a tangential narrative that put fans in Leanne's shoes- giving them an opportunity to Survive the Attic... as they continued on through the experience, the bespoke puzzles became increasingly difficult- to near impossible. And begged that fans paid attention to every single detail of Shyamalan's masterwork.

In the show's first season, Servant attracted some of the most rabid, intelligent fans Apple TV+ had ever seen- termed "Intellectual Telephiles." Psychographic analysis taught us that they self-described as cinephiles, critics and TV lovers. They showed up in large numbers on discussion driven platforms to dissect every detail of the show in depth.

They were driven by a desire to be the fan who solved the show's "M. Night Mysteries." As the show entered its second season, we wanted to meet these Intellectual Telephiles at their level- and give them something to rally around.

Our strategy was to Serve Servant's Intellectual Audience by Truly Testing their Ability to Solve M. Night's Mysteries. We wanted our fans to feel true pride in their fandom and knowledge- and we knew that, to do so, we would need to lean hard into creating the most difficult experience possible.

The activation launched one week before Servant's Season 2 finale, giving our core fandom time to grow throughout the season, and catch up with the integral bits of knowledge they'd need to survive.

This fan service experience lived as a microsite on experience.apple, and fans discovered it either via organic social posts, tweets and swipe up stories from Apple TV and Servant's official Instagram and Twitter, or from fan shares. We also surprised and delighted 70+ super fans with exclusive direct access to the experience.

Survive the Attic drove conversation among fans, strengthened our communities, and helped us beat engagement benchmarks.

Survive the Attic played an integral, fan-service role in our season 2 marketing plan for Servant. The activation succeeded in engaging fans and giving them something to rally around. It was distributed with $0 media budget to only our most fervent fan communities. Of the 8k who engaged with the experience in its launch week, we delivered an impressive 32% bounce rate. Corresponding content beat engagement benchmarks, delivering a 13% engagement rate on Instagram and a 1.7% engagement rate on Twitter.

Fans turned to Reddit and Facebook Groups, creating dedicated threads to help each other through- with a few fans even creating their own STA fan accounts. Hundreds of fans shared their excitement at "Surviving"; allowing them to show off their deep knowledge of Servant's mysteries.