We utilized Mr. Robot’s tone of voice and aesthetics to “hack” the Mr. Robot Facebook page for 24 hours by broadcasting 11 customized “Global Rants” via Facebook Live. Each live video was targeted to its local demographic, in local languages, encouraging the audiences to participate in real-time. What fans didn’t realize was that there was an even larger reveal just around the corner. Three days later, fans were invited to a Facebook Live Q&A session with the entire Mr. Robot cast at Story — a concept store in NYC. Our audience and digital fan base was shocked when fsociety hacked the livestream to drop Part 1 of the Season 2 premiere. At the same time, a single tweet appeared from @whoismrrobot, announcing the limited availability of the premiere across multiple social platforms like Snapchat and Youtube, inciting digital frenzy across the web as people tried to watch the episode.

We kicked off our “Global Rants” by broadcasting to eleven countries in five languages – English, Spanish, Thai, Indonesian, and Cantonese – on July 7th, 2016. Several days after, we “hacked” the Facebook Live Q&A session with the Mr. Robot cast. In preparation for the “Global Rants,” we produced a number of sets themed as underground fsociety lairs. Each was designed to look and feel as though the feeds were broadcasted directly from the UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, and more. Additionally, our engineering team created Levee, which was built to ensure geo-targeting of the IP in the streams. Levee uses the latest Facebook targeting API to restrict viewership to the countries you specify. In order to generate cross-platform buzz for our Premiere Hack, we strategically placed the season two premiere across popular social media sites Snapchat, YouTube, and Twitter, as well as USA’s website, for a limited time.

The initial “Global Rants” garnered 20 million impressions, 5 million video views, 260,000 likes, 57,000 comments, and 16,700 shares worldwide. The Premiere Hack ended up generating 15 million total impressions and over 750,000 video views in less than 3 hours. Our collective efforts resulted in an astounding 30 million media impressions made, including features on NPR, The Tonight Show, Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Variety and more. Social sentiment was overwhelmingly positive with posts centered around excitement for the premiere, as well as acclaim for our unconventional release strategy. All this attention resulted in Mr. Robot trending on Facebook and Twitter for multiple days, and proving that there really are no rules in TV marketing.

Our goal with the Mr. Robot Season 2 launch was to reach a targeted (yet global) audience, create a frenzy online, and generate earned media across the web; all while reinforcing Mr. Robot’s “hacker culture” brand message. We built proprietary technology in partnership with Facebook’s engineering team to ensure we could reach our targeted audiences worldwide with custom localized messaging, sent a single tweet as a call-to-action that snowballed into 30 million impressions across the web, and “hacked” a Facebook Live Q&A with the show’s cast.

One of our key challenges was geo-fencing the Mr. Robot live rants, making sure that only users in specific countries could watch their own local rant. Unfortunately, none of the commercially available Facebook Live streaming tools offered out-of-the-box geo-fencing capabilities. To overcome this, we built our own tool: Levee. As one of Facebook’s few Media Solutions Partners, our engineers were able to add country-specific location restrictions to the Facebook Live Video API. Using Levee we were able to generate Facebook Live posts targeted to any locale we chose, and stream them from any commercially available streaming software (such as WireCast or Telescope). We’ve since released this tool as an open source project.

To promote the Season 2 premiere of USA Network’s hit show, Mr. Robot, our goal was to create a robust pre-linear campaign that would shatter the expectations of traditional television marketing. Our mission was to incite a digital frenzy and ignite mass awareness in anticipation for the July 13th linear premiere by producing a revolutionary, international, online/offline campaign, the likes of which the world had never seen.