To bring our idea to life, we built a custom set inspired by the hacker lair from the show providing our fsociety members a place to interact with Twitch viewers during the livestream. The set had a realistic and cinematic grittiness, which helped transport people into the distinct world created in the series.

We started the campaign by hacking into Twitch's livestream at the E3 and seeding 13 scripted vignettes with custom messages from fsociety.

Through carefully choreographed vignettes and an artistically designed set, viewers reaped the benefits of our fsociety's digital corporate takedown as we deleted over $100,000 of the people's debt in real time.

Over the course of the 17-hour livestream, we let the audience dictate the actions of our fsociety members — communicating in real-time with the hackers via chat, Twitter, and Facebook. This real-time engagement proved to viewers that the stream was truly live and was by far the most effective way of engaging with our audience.

Viewers were incentivized to host our campaign on their personal channel knowing they could be called out live by our hackers. Throughout the activation we saw over 2,700 people host our stream!

Twitter was also a key player, with nearly 65,000 people tweeting @whoismrrobot over three days. Many of these tweets proposed challenges to our fsociety hackers, which were accepted moments later, live on set.

Every 30 minutes the hackers would reveal a new code, giving viewers a chance to reclaim a portion of the $100k. Ultimately 1200 winners were announced & paid live.

The campaign ultimately garnered 1,562,280 total views, 309,651 email entries, 63,363 twitter entries, 17,367 max concurrents, 8,549,422 million minutes of video watched, and a potential reach of over 25 million. This is the first time a TV network, more specifically a scripted drama — has built a custom digital, interactive experience for the Twitch platform. It is also by far the largest cash giveaway that has been done using Twitch. From the concept to the set to the reaction online, this was a campaign teeming with firsts and the buzz created helped Mr. Robot secure a season 2 renewal before the show even premiered on USA Network.

Mr. Robot is the winner of two Golden Globe Awards, three Critics' Choice Television Awards, one Gotham Independent Film Award, and the Audience Choice Award at SXSW.

The Mr. Robot real-time debt deletion occurred over 17 hours of livestream on Twitch, during which our fsociety hackers played games with the audience, built custom video games, invented internet connected hardware in real time, destroyed hard drives, and even got busted by a SWAT team. Our goal was to create mass awareness with a young, gaming audience and immerse them in the themes of the series. Every 30 minutes the hackers would reveal a new code, giving viewers a chance to reclaim a portion of the $100k we were giving away. Winners were announced and paid out live.

The Debt Deletion campaign was a custom, interactive experience built for Twitch — a live streaming platform with 35 million monthly users. Twitch's tech-savvy audience was the perfect demographic for Mr. Robot and the platform's innate social nature was ideal for leveraging reach and accessibility.

We started the campaign by hacking into Twitch's livestream at the E3 gaming convention — the platform's most watched feed every year — with custom messages from fsociety, the fictitious hacker group from the series.

When E3 Coverage ended, Twitch hosted the first 15 minutes of the Mr. Robot livestream, immediately attracting thousands of viewers. As our hackers migrated over to the Mr. Robot page, Twitch's viewers came with us, garnering over 19,000 concurrent streams.

Mr. Robot, a dark and complex new drama series on USA Network, follows the story of a young programmer who works at a cyber-security firm by day and is a vigilante hacker by night. He is recruited by an underground hacker group to help bring down the world financial system, erasing over 70% of the world's debt.

To promote the premiere of the show, we created a massive, first of its kind campaign. Our goal was to create mass awareness with a young, gaming audience and immerse them in the themes of the series. We wanted to do something radical that would also make a difference; we would delete over $100,000 of debt, live on Twitch.

Twitch is a live streaming platform with 35 million monthly users who login to watch people play video games. Twitch's tech-savvy audience was the perfect demographic for Mr. Robot.