For the past six seasons, the identity of A, the anonymous villain on Pretty Little Liars, has been a huge mystery. Millions of people wanted to know who the nefarious character was, and in the summer 2015, we decided to reveal A's identity in the summer finale. We wanted to capitalize on this momentous occasion by creating an engaging campaign that would generate social buzz around this highly anticipated episode.
On the morning of the PLL summer finale, we launched a Twitter flock-to-unlock. With every 50,000 tweets we received, we released a new clue about the identity of A at PLLFinale.com, generating hundreds of thousands of tweets throughout the day!
Spoiler Alert! Immediately after the A reveal within the episode, we ran an on-air promo encouraging fans to tweet #CeCeIsA 300,000 times to unlock an exclusive video featuring Vanessa Ray, the actress who played A. Once the video was unlocked, fans were able to view an exclusive reaction video in which Vanessa talked about what it was like to play A. We cross-promoted the activation on multiple social platforms to get fans to use the hashtag and continue to drive buzz after the reveal happened.
Our PLL finale campaign was a huge success, helping to generate huge awareness, buzz and tune-in for the PLL finale! The show generated more than 4.5 million tweets over the course of the day, trending on Twitter for nearly 24 hours. PLL notched near 2-year ratings highs among target demographics. In fact, the finale ranked as the series' #2 summer finale on record in the key 18-34 and 18-49 categories.
The PLL finale became the #1 most tweeted TV series telecast of Summer 2015 – and the #3 most tweeted cable TV series episode on record – amassing over 1.6 million tweets, accounting for 50% of all Twitter TV Tweet activity for the day. These over 1.6 million tweets were seen by a Twitter TV audience of 6.2 million unique users and generated over 68 million Twitter TV impressions.
