Bag of Bones is A&E’s two part, four-hour mini series based on Stephen King’s 1998 award-winning novel. The story follows a distraught, recently widowed novelist named Mike Noonan to his secluded lake house where he battles his writer’s block, disturbing nightmares and terrifying visions. Ghosts that live in the house soon begin leaving clues for Mike that uncover a mystery that has been unfolding in the town ever since the 1930s. The show’s primary target audience is ages 43 to 57 with a female skew, an overall median age of 40. To drive tune-in to the premiere night of the two-part original miniseries and make Bag of Bones a “must see" TV event, A&E created a multi-tiered social media campaign. The goals of the campaign were to differentiate the miniseries from everything else in the cluttered cable landscape by underscoring the premium nature of series and to highlight the Stephen King and Pierce Bronson names wherever possible The campaign drew heavily on the powerful Bag of Bones “BEWARE THE LAKE" key art: beautiful photography that conveys a sense of suspense, eeriness and surprise. These photos were featured prominently on the A&E homepage and appeared on various “Bag of Bones" social networking accounts, notably the Facebook fan page, GetGlue and Klout. Talent was also activated on Twitter, via live tweeting during the two-night event (@AnikaNoniRose & @annabethgish). The Bag of Bones Facebook page acted as a hub for everything relating to the show, giving fans excited about the show a place to congregate. Content was focused on tune in info, clip spots, behind the scenes content, photography from set, cast interviews, Dark Score Stories site links. When the miniseries aired on A&E, GetGlue Integration allowed fans to unlock limited edition stickers upon “checking in" to the show on GetGlue.com. A&E also produced a narrative around the events within the miniseries to develop early engagement. Within the narrative was a hidden puzzle game for the series in which viewers could search for clues and hidden messages and go on online scavenger hunts in pursuit of short creepy video clips. Unlocking a puzzle enable participants to earn a Get Glue sticker. The network used these games to garner buzz for the miniseries on larger, well-known websites across the blogosphere. By using Klout, a company that provides social media analytics to measure individual user's influence across their social networks, A&E identified and rewarded its most influential fans. Tiered packages included digital animated assets, a physical copy of the Bag of Bones novel re-release, a Dark Score Stories coffee table book, digital photos & access to the LA premiere event. A newsletter, with details about the premiere for “Bag of Bones" was digitally sent out to 120k subscribers. Results: -The Facebook fan page had 34,428 likes as of 12/15/2011. -Press pick up was quite strong, with the Dark Score stories featured on entertainment and horror websites, blogs and trade publications. Some of these include: PerezHilton.com, EW.com, IMDB.com, Fearnet.com, StephenKing.com and MediaBistro.com. -According to Entertainment Weekly, the mini-series performed quite well pulling in 3.4 million viewers the night of premiere & ranking as the most watched program on cable that night. Part 2 showed strong retention, delivering another 3 M viewers. It’s the best-performing miniseries since A&E’s own Andromedia Strain.
http://www.darkscorestories.com http://www/getglue.com/tv_shows/stephen_king_bag_of_bones http://klout.com/#/perk/AE/BagofBonesNovel http://klout.com/#/perk/AE/BagofBonesNovelPhotobook
