In anticipation of Season 3, we wanted to reignite fans’ fierce passion for the show by pulling them back into the “kill or be killed” world of the Badlands, and getting them reinvested in the characters’ plights. We used Instagram Stories to launch a truly immersive experience—one where they could experience the thrill, danger, and tension of the show firsthand. By leveraging exclusive footage from the show to string together stories that played out coherently over 15-20 15-second frames, we created a first of its kind interactive 3-part miniseries. When drawn into the “Surviving the Badlands” miniseries, fans were thrown into adrenaline-inducing scenes, and could made life or death decisions that decided the fates of their favorite characters.

On April 15th, 19th, and 21st, we released a new episode of “Surviving the Badlands” on Instagram Stories. Each episode was also “teased” on @IntotheBadlandsAMC, so that fans who had missed an episode could go back and play them chronologically. The three episodes ranged from 16 to 21 clips of 15 seconds each, and gave fans multiple chances to control the storylines through on-screen calls to action like “Tap 1X to Fight”, and “Tap 3X to Kill. In this way, fans chose which characters got to live, die, and make or break alliances. Fans found out about the new episodes through promoted posts across Facebook and Instagram, and could tap straight into the new episode in app. Before each episode began, we reminded fans to tune in to the upcoming Season 3 premiere.

Instagram Stories only remain live for 24 hours. Over the aggregated 72 hours “Surviving the Badlands” was live, we saw 264,619 individual sessions take place. 74% of users, on average, followed the tapping instructions as we displayed them, proving that our execution, rooted in existing platform behavior, was the best way to engage fans. 3.6% of users also tapped backwards–uninstructed by us–just to replay it with the choices they didn’t make initially.

Even several cast members got in on the action (without being asked), including Executive Producer and star of the show Daniel Wu, who touted the experience to fans from his personal Instagram handle.

When played end to end, the episodes added up to nearly 15 minutes of content. Yet we released it all on a platform built for 15 second videos, and still saw an incredibly high average completion rate of 36%.