Lost At Sea - An innovative, immersive campaign for The Last Passenger by Will Dean.

31 Jul

In the opening chapters of THE LAST PASSENGER by Will Dean, we find our main character to be completely alone aboard a luxury ocean liner, heading full-steam out into the Atlantic, with not a single other soul on board. Or is that the case at all?

When I read Will Dean’s THE LAST PASSENGER, I knew we had an opportunity to create something really memorable with our readers. When we’re asked, as Tandem, what the future of digital storytelling looks like we often answer with immersive, intimate and innovative campaigns - this campaign ticks all three elements; the trifecta at sea.

Lucky for us, the team at Hodder are always super trusting when it comes to our wild ideas and fully engaged in our plan of action to strand our readers at sea, whilst maintaining the core community values of a readalong that our readers love so much.

In a standard readalong, around a week before kick off, we’d circulate a participants list and create an IG DM group - this allows our readers to meet each other and form a bond before kicking off reading. We’ve found this is an imperative part of each campaign.

For THE LAST PASSENGER, we decided that rather than share that information up front, we would send out our packages first. The readalong boxes for this campaign consisted of the book, a ticket to travel, a ‘first-name-only’ passenger manifest, a single small bottle of water, a hostess twinkie, and a poster of their luxury ship doubling as a map.

With this, we introduced The Admiral.

The Admiral features as a character in the book - faceless and nameless, but an all-commanding voice delivering instructions for those on board the RMS Atlantica. We used this character as our readalong Admiral. Just like in the book, everyday at 6pm, we delivered a pre-recorded Whatsapp Voice Note to each participant delivering their next set of instructions.

Our first Voice Note read:

“Good evening, passengers. Welcome aboard the RMS Atlantica. You have three days to locate your fellow readalong’ers before we can start the readalong for Will Dean’s The Last Passenger. As this is your first evening, we’ll give you a clue. Post an unboxing of your readalong parcel to #TheLastPassengerReadalong, and see how many of the 30 Readalong’ers you can find.

We’re appointing @LexBrookman as Co-Captain. When you’ve found an additional passenger, you can let @LexBrookman know via personal DM, and they will add you into a DM group. The readalong can only start when all thirty of you have been located.

Safe sailing.”

From here, reader’s used unboxing posts on the hashtags to find more and more passengers, matching the content online with the first-names on the passenger manifest to complete a full boarding of passengers.

Our second voice note read:

Good evening, passengers. Welcome aboard the RMS Atlantica. @LexBrookman informs us that you have found all of the passengers on the manifest, and that you’re ready to set sail. Begin reading now. Safe sailing.

And everyday at 6pm after that, there were more instructions, warnings and advice from The Admiral. On the last day of our readalong, we introduced The Captain. A captain doesn’t feature in the novel, but we knew this would be an innovative, exciting way to get author Will Dean involved, as our readers had taken so well to the voice note experiment.

Our final voice note read:

Good evening, passengers. We’re so glad that you made it to the end. Well done on finding all of the passengers on the readalong manifest. Congratulations on surviving.

We do have one final challenge for you…

But for this, we’ll be handing over to our Captain.

*Will Dean’s voice, reads out a final creative challenge not featured on the readalong cards*

That’s it from us, for now. Signing off, The Admiral.

We received great feedback from all of our readers on this campaign and one of the most impressive things (to me!) was that on our standard crime / thriller readalongs, our reading schedule goes out of the window due to the reader’s sheer need to finish the book and know what happens - that wasn’t the case this time. We gave everyone very strict instructions not to mess with the schedule, and with The Admiral on our side all of our readers behaved and it just gave another brilliant element of being ‘trapped’ to our readalong’ers - they LOVED IT!

This is such a great idea. I’m housebound due to being disabled so it’s great for me to meet people virtually. - Jude Wright

This is such a good way to get everyone involved and chatting! - Rachael

Just nine [passengers] left for me too! This is the most fun I’ve ever had prior to a readalong before! It’s really made me feel part of the group too!! - Ellie Spencer

I’m loving the involvement in this readalong already! - Jude Wright

This readalong was absolutely amazing, it was so so fun. Lex did a fabulous job at setting the scene with the voice notes in WhatsApp etc. Best readalong I've taken part in yet! - @crimethrillerbooks

Loved the creative challenges, the pre-readalong activity was absolutely brilliant and got the readalong team really engaging with one another. - @frombethanysbookshelf

I loved how interactive this readalong was, with the group chat and the WhatsApp messages. I think this is my favourite Tandem readalong so far! - @whatjodiereads

Absolutely loved the interactive game content- being part of the passengers list, finding fellow passengers, receiving daily voice notes and updates. It was such a fun and lively readalong. - @karla_bookishlife

This readalong raised a higher than average engagement rate and was an absolute HIT with our creators. If you’d like to find the readalong cards and more info on the book, please check out the dedicated web page here.