The most-watched Facebook Live of its time.

In 2016, Facebook Live was brand new and largely unproven: the platform was paying publishers to try it, nobody had settled what a live format was for, and most early attempts were static cameras pointed at things. The audience was there; the format that deserved it was not.

The 2016 US Election was a once-a-cycle moment to change that. Every feed on the internet would be watching the same story at the same time, which is precisely the condition live formats are built for, and precisely the moment a publisher could own if it moved fast and made the coverage interactive rather than just another broadcast. The bet was that on a night when everyone had an opinion, the winning format would be the one that let the audience express it.

We paired Facebook Live with Facebook's emoji reactions to build an in-house interactive voting tool: viewers reacted with emojis, which drove a live on-screen counter of audience sentiment. The broadcast became a running, visible poll of how the internet felt as the night unfolded, something no static stream could offer.

We launched the moment the result broke, took first-mover advantage on the format, and promoted it hard across UNILAD's platforms, turning a passive stream into mass participation: 700,000-plus concurrent viewers and over five million engagements, the most-viewed Facebook Live on the platform at the time.