To launch Season 2 of 13 Reasons Why, Netflix set out to give fans something special — a first-of-its-kind, in-world immersive experience that would extend the world of the show by giving fans an opportunity to immerse themselves in the story, playing the role of a character from Liberty High. Targeting a digital savvy demographic, there was a desire to experiment with cutting-edge technology and storytelling. Because Netflix prides itself on global reach, the experience had to be deployable at scale, in the most efficient way. As a prestige franchise property, 13 Reasons Why has an extremely dedicated fanbase, so every detail of the execution had to be canon, the script needed to be approved by the show and fit seamlessly into the story being told the next season.

Through shaping the format of conversational storytelling, we are defining the next generation of immersive storytelling. With everything that is happening with natural language processing, branching narrative and consumer demands for real-time personalization, conversational storytelling makes the story about you, by letting you play the role of a character at the center of the drama where your words matter and the characters care about what you say and feel. For Netflix, 13 Reasons Why was a perfect vehicle for bringing this new medium to the world at scale and giving the next generation a window into the future of entertainment.

As an in-world immersive experience, Talk to the Reasons needed to feel seamlessly integrated into the social habits of the demographic. For Discovery, social promotion assets mimic-ed getting an incoming Facetime call from Clay, the star of the show. When you hit answer, the Story offered a CTA to Swipe Up to Answer. Swiping Up took you into an experience that transformed your phone into the phone of a student at Liberty High. Organic promotion was driven by the show’s owned social accounts. To reach the Netflix global audience, TalkToTheReasons launched in 8 languages across 17 countries with each region running customized social campaigns to promote the local language executions. Working closely with both Snapchat and Instagram, customized strategies were developed to make the experience feel as seamless as possible.

To create the 8 minute immersive experience, it all started with the script. A 35-page screenplay was developed in close collaboration with the show runners, to make sure every line of dialog is canon. Shooting with the show’s cast, footage was captured to cover all branching storylines. To implement the experience at scale required local language processing, and microphone/camera access function in all major mobile browsers. This was one of the first major use cases for the recently unveiled Safari getUserMedia API, so all development was done without pre-existing documentation. To make language processing as quick as possible, cloud-based NLP solutions did not work fast enough, so a local language processing tool powered by machine learning was developed. This local language processor was then adapted for eight different languages to enable the worldwide launch where fans around the world got to enjoy the experience in their local language.

To make this a true in-world immersive experience, Talk to the Reasons needed to feel seamlessly integrated into the phone and social habits of the demographic. We worked closely with different popular social media outlet teams so the experience design mirrored their favorite apps like Instagram, Snapchat, Houseparty, and Facetime. For Discovery, social promotion assets mimic-ed getting an incoming Facetime call from Clay, the star of the show. Swiping Up to answer the call took you into an experience that transformed your phone into the phone of a student at Liberty High. Organic promotion was driven by the show’s owned social accounts. To reach the Netflix global audience, TalkToTheReasons launched in 8 languages across 17 countries with each region running customized social campaigns to promote the local language executions. Working closely with both Snapchat and Instagram, customized strategies were developed to make the experience feel as seamless as possible.

From a business perspective, Talk to the Reasons was a big success. Beyond performance metrics, which proved it was worth the effort, our goal was to give 13 Reasons Why fans a glimpse into the future of interactive storytelling, and their reactions as well as the information we gathered during the development and testing process, allowed us to get invaluable learnings about the way people respond to innovative media, and the importance of finding the right balance to optimize the user experience without breaking immersiveness.