USA ‘Suits Up’ to Social TV With ‘Suits Recruits’

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USA ‘Suits Up’ to Social TV With ‘Suits Recruits’

June 11th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

When USA’s hit show Suits returns to the airwaves on June 14, fans will already be part of the storyline, thanks to a new interactive social TV campaign that the network is rolling out.

Known as “Suits Recruits,” the interactive and social media-laden experience allows fans to join the team at Pearson Hardman and help Harvey and Mike work on an on-going case.

This isn’t the first time USA has dipped into the social TV/transmedia waters. Last year, the network launched of a first-of-its kind interactive experience for Psych dubbed #HashTagKiller.

The success of HashTag Killer has helped pave the way for other social TV experiments, including MTV’s new Teen Wolf: The Hunt as well as “Suits Recruits.” As with Teen Wolf and Psych, “Suits Recruits” is built on the Social Samba platform. The experience was built in HTML5, which means it runs great on a phone, tablet or desktop.

“We’ve taken what we learned from ‘HashTag’ and applied those lessons to ‘Recruits’,” says Jesse Redniss, SVP of digital at USA.

“Suits and Psych have different audiences and that means we have to approach social in slightly different ways,” he adds.

Indeed, one of the benefits that Psych had with its interactive experience was a deeply social audience. Still, USA is hoping that the audience with Suits will still make time to log on and take part in the story.

Making Social Scale

“Suits Recruits” integrates heavily with Facebook — though users don’t have to connect with the social network if they don’t want to — and the storyline was written by Suits writers.

“The storyline was actually something that was originally intended to be an episode of the show,” Redniss tells us. The writers then crafted the script as a more interactive experience.

Moreover, video with the Suits cast was shot for use within the experience. What’s interesting to note about these videos is that they can act as stand-alone webisodes. In fact, the plan is to re-purpose the clips on the main Suits websites — as well as on DVD — after “Suits Recruits” ends.

Unlike #HashTagKiller, which launched without an advertising sponsor, “Suits Recruits” is sponsored by Lexus. Lexus also advertises on Suits, which helps show that social TV tie-ins can be a value-add to advertisers.

While “Suits Recruits” is a parallel storyline to the main Suits arc, there will be some potential overlap in the future. The interactive experience will roll out over three days each week and coincide with what’s happening on Suits on the air.

Moreover, USA is hoping to use the “Suits Recruits” site as a centralized hub for all the conversations happening around the show. To do that, the network will integrate its USA Chatter platform into the experience.

This is the Future of Storytelling

The fact that Suits doesn’t have the type of fanatical following on social media that Psych and Teen Wolf have is what makes “Suits Recruits” most interesting to us.

If “Suits Recruits” is a success, it’s even more proof that social TV has real potential as a future storytelling medium.

For years, I’ve been arguing that social TV can’t really take off until content creators and networks start thinking about the social elements when actually writing the show. Each successive interactive storytelling exercise gets us closer to that point.

“Suits Recruits” will run for the first half of the new Suits season and will launch later today.