Problemo: My Year Without Sex was a new Australian film, which was hard to market as it didn’t fit into one specific category. The trailer was not going to be enough to get people to watch it. Working on a small budget we needed to get people to talk about the film.
Strategy: Use word of mouth to help fuel discussion around the movie
Implementation:
Identifying Key Environments
We identified the target market as mothers. Using Google Ad Planner and a number of other tools we looked for the environments where mothers were most vocal online and three environments stood out; Facebook, Mothers Forums and Mother Blogs.
Part 1: Mothers Forums
We went out to a number of the major mothers forums and offered the Moderators of the sites free double passes to see the film. Forums host some of the liveliest discussions online.
Part 2: Blogs
We identified a number of influential female blogs that we thought would enjoy the film. These bloggers were found using the Top 100 Australian Women Bloggers list. From this list we got a number of high profile bloggers to go and see the movie. We also used the NuffNang to outreach to a further 20 bloggers.
Part 3: Facebook
There was an opportunity to get a number of people along to a pre screening for the film in each major cities. We used Facebook Advertising and a Facebook Event to set up an exclusive Facebook Pre Screening for 500 people. We also ran a Facebook Page which had further information about the movie.
Part 4: Youtube - Creating a piece of passable content
We decided to create a piece of content around the film which we believed could have mass appeal online. We created the ‘5 Things that get in the way of Sex’ video. We were able to get this video to the front page of Digg and then Youtube Honour Board with 25,000 views in one week. This ended up being the feature of a blog post in Sydney Morning Herald Ask Sam Blog.
Result:
In its opening week MYWS took $177,522 and has currently grossed $1,127,838 in box office sales.
Learnings:
Facebook Page
It is really hard for someone to become a fan of a product that they have no knowledge about. We did not see growth in the Page until after the release date which usually does not work with the timings/budgeting of films.
Facebook Advertising
This campaign ran from early April to May this year, this was before the upgrade to the Facebook advertising model. We were only able to manage to get 900 people into the Page for the movie, when we promoted Cedar Boys another Australian film we were able to get 2,000 easily into the Page. So this new upgrade has definitely made a difference.
4 comments:
The key lessons coming from "My Year Without Sex" and other successful social media film marketing campaigns seems to be identifying and targeting the core demographic. Mothers are a great demo because they communicate among one another and are under-catered at the flicks (I know what my choice would be between this and the latest Sandra Bullock train-wreck).
"Paranormal Activity" in the US could be one of the most profitable films at the box office this year off the back of its social media campaign. Being the classic screen-scream flick that teens and early 20's flock to, Paramount previewed free midnight screenings at college venues and encouraged viewers to tweet and spread the word. Then folks can demand the flick via eventful.com, the petition is sent to their local cinema, who can then request a print of the flick for screening. That's not just marketing savvy, its also saving on the conventional distribution costs.
Nice work Jules. Loving the case studies you are sharing. Are you able to share the goals the client had for the campaign? Was the result higher/lower than they expected? Did they find that this approach had better cost efficiencies than previous mainstream marketing for movies of a similar budget?
PLooks so much more appealing than the first ‘trailer’ I saw. There’s a story here! Looking forward to the film.
Yeah. And films like that were the films that were inspiring me. I could relate to that more than I could some of the films that I was seeing here.
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