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Ozometer by Play
The campaign was created to celebrate Foster's famous ‘No Worries’ attitude. In creating the campaign, Play searched for some of Britain’s most, and least, ‘No worries’ people, celebrities and places. More on Play's award winning campaign.Generating a buzz and harnessing the hype
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- Word of mouth and online PR
- Social networking
- Blogging
- Alternate Reality Games
- Case Study: Faint Heart
Reduced to one of its most basic aims, the role of marketing is to create brand champions. A survey of 660 online consumers by Intelliseek revealed that people are 50 percent more likely to be influenced by word-of-mouth recommendations from their peers than by radio or TV adverts. Aside from the effective awareness driving, more traditional online advertising tools that are available - which we will outline later in this report - the internet allows the innovative film marketer to create a buzz around their film in truly engaging and original ways.
There is a massive community of influential film fans online, hungry for information on upcoming releases and eager to share their thoughts and opinions. The most successful campaigns that have utilised digital in recent years have tapped into this influential group to generate hype and grow an audience ahead of a film’s opening weekend.
A number of films have recently proven that almost anything will be passed on if it’s made available online. The release of a comic book franchise film, spiderman, Batman and X-Men for example, is accompanied with the exchange of feverish speculation, opinion and reviews. Images, video content, script snippets and cast interviews are passed on or shared via blogs, forums, YouTube and other social networking sites.
Where several years ago these exchanges often occurred independently and detached from the marketing process, you are now able to initiate, get involved and to a certain extent control the word of mouth activity surrounding your film. There are a number of creative and online PR agencies that are experts in taking key elements of your film to targeted groups, turning them into brand advocates. There are also a number of clever techniques and tools that encourage people to talk about your film.
Word of mouth and online PR
Online PR is becoming a necessary part of film marketing and one that should be considered if you have not yet already done so. It can be as simple as directly engaging with bloggers with responses to their comments, or by seeding easy to find information around your film that they will find interesting and publish without much filtering with their comments attached. This can be done with search engine optimised press releases fed into the right newswires at the right time of day.
A slightly more involved process can involve the use of ‘street team’ tasks. These offer merchandise and premier tickets as rewards to star bloggers. By tapping into the film fan’s sense of exclusivity in an organic fashion and in a way that does not make them feel manipulated, positive buzz around a film can be built.
An example that Reeder gave was from his work in the promotion of the film version of the Diving Bell and the Butterfly. On the face of it this film that depicts stroke victim, Jean-Dominique Bauby, writing his memoir using just his eyelid, might not seem the most uplifting of tales, nor one overly suited to online promotion work. The very fact, however, that this film does not have broad appeal, made it ideally suited to the internet’s ability to target niche markets. BLM Quantum found people passionate about this type of film on blogs and social media sites and took this actually very uplifting tale to them. The consumer reveal approach proved extremely effective for this film.
This process does need to be handled sensitively. People don’t necessarily see themselves as brand advocates and no one wants to be exploited. Online PR agencies will take the buzz to relevant communities for you, but as digital strategist Christian Perrins warns, if you want it done really well you need to talk with your communities honestly. “Go to the Buffy forums and say, “we have this new film with Sarah Michelle Gellar coming out, would you be interested?” You need to take a brand to a community rather than create a new community around a brand.”
An important part of online PR is treating digital publications and publishers with the same attention that a traditional PR agency would give to offline media. It makes sense to do so too when titles’ web audiences frequently dwarf those of their print counterparts. Creative agency New Media Maze, specialists in the online film promotion arena, set up an exclusive video interview between King Kong director, Peter Jackson and readers of the Sun Online to promote the Paramount release and when Bridget Jones II was about to hit the DVD shelves they asked readers of Female First how they really feel about their ‘wobbly bits’ in a fun online survey.
Campaigns incorporating online PR have become more sophisticated in 2008. The DVD release for Resident Evil - Extinction, for example, used an innovative combination and integration of online PR and more traditional internet marketing executions. The campaign encouraged visitors to the site to ‘get infected’. Once ‘zombification’ occurred and users had built up their agility in ‘the pit’, they were thrown into traditional rich media executions to do battle with the film’s lead character, Alice. The last Zombie standing won its user an assortment of audio visual treats, including a Playstation 3 and a widescreen TV.
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Social networking
Facebook, for example, have recognised that word of mouth is what every marketer is after. Therefore they offer movie pages where consumers can become a fan of a film and then share that status amongst their friends. If marketers also offer some form of social currency on these sites and play by the rules of the community there is an even greater chance that this peer to peer brand affinity will occur. The Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull social media campaign provided a widget that could be added to both a MySpace and a Facebook page. It also offered an added incentive to add the widget in that you had the opportunity win tickets to the worldwide premiere. On Facebook there was also a SuperPoke application that enabled you to use Dr Jones’ preferred weapon of choice and whip selected friends.
Social networking sites offer so much to entertainment brands, because music and film are subjects that friends on these sites will naturally talk about and may often form part of their personality. It is obviously far harder, for example, to convince a consumer to add an Ariel washing powder widget to their Facebook page.
The flexibility of social networking sites enable them to be used for all kinds of film marketing activity. “Social networking is becoming almost more important than the website.” Jonathan Green of digital agency Franki&Jonny believes. ”A couple of years ago clients would come to us and say ‘can we have a MySpace page?’ Now they are coming to us and they already have it. With this DIY marketing ethos companies already have the pages set up.” The groundwork is in place, but agencies are required to push the creative boundaries and potential of these sites even further.
Whether you are launching a studio film or an independent, introducing a new character or reestablishing an old one they are an inexpensive and effective tool. Along with widgets, they can convey film information, house blogs, stream audio and video and facilitate dialogue.
Andrew Warren of entertainment industry creative agency FEREF highlighted the importance of making available syndicated content for consumers to add to their social networking pages. More and more film sites are making their content available as pieces of a jigsaw, so the consumer can select what they want to appropriate for sharing, be it a piece of video, a blog or images. Also the send to a friend function has now been expanded to enable content to be sent to more than one person. Send to many friends is a popular addition to content.
A concern was voiced at the Microsoft Advertising roundtable discussion as to whether Facebook was becoming saturated and whether we are experiencing the death of social networking. Scott Gallacher of BSkyB perceptively argued that this is a problem with marketing full-stop and that we are very quick to call ‘the death’ of something. Marketers should not be overly preoccupied with ‘the end’ or saturation of a particular marketing movement, nor should they try and be at the ‘forefront’ of one. Their concern should simply be whether the channel they are using is appropriate to the product they are advertising.
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Blogging
One of the earliest manifestations of web 2.0, the blog, is still proving an effective tool for the promotion of films. On-set diaries, informal in nature, that begin during the production of films that are regularly updated serve many purposes. They immediately draw the consumer into the film making process, raising awareness of the picture. They enable the consumer to gain information about a film and open a dialogue between the filmmaker and their audience.
A terrific example of a flawless blogging campaign for a film is the work completed for the 2007 Fox Searchlight film, Sunshine. Quite a niche picture about a quest to reignite the sun, the Danny Boyle directed film ran a blog for over two years. Each of the regularly updated posts received huge amounts of user comments, as many as 250 for some, creating a community around the release. An important result of this internet activity is that when ‘sunshine’ is entered into a search engine, the movie comes out top in the natural listings, a great achievement for a term that must generate a number of searches for an assortment of different reasons.
The ‘everyone’s a critic’ nature of the internet means that blogs and informal sites like AintItCoolNews and Rotten Tomatoes have the ability to create a buzz or even essentially kill a film before it has even opened and filmmakers ignore these audiences at their peril. However, in certain instances these audiences can be listened to too much. Snakes On A Plane is by now an infamous example of a film that took on-board the opinions and suggestions of the online community and fed them into the film itself, with the violence quota and even lines of dialogue included to satisfy their stipulated requirements. Here was a great example of a community being built up around a film, but when it came to the release, its reviews and box office figures ultimately disappointed.
There is an argument to suggest that the filmmakers gave the audience too much and to an extent lost control of the brand. It is important to retain some mystique, to use your audience, but not rely on them. More and more films will include user interaction in the future, but fundamentally filmmakers are going to want to keep control of their product.
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Alternate Reality Games
ARGs hit the headlines in 2007 following the double assault of Cloverfield and Batman Begins sequel the Dark Knight, but something similar was used as early as 2001 to promote Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence: AI. Similarly to online PR, ARGs play on the curiosity of film fans and in really successful cases the wider film going public, to dig, scratch and scavenge across the internet and beyond for information on a film.
The Dark Knight, the latest film in the Batman franchise successfully used a combination of websites and user generated activity to reveal the first clear image of Heath Ledger as the caped crusader’s infamous nemesis, the Joker. Film fans were encouraged to work for a sought after reward and they did in great numbers.
Cloverfield’s achievements in the ARG space were arguably even greater than what the Dark Knight achieved. Considering its lack of heritage and iconic characters, Paramount’s success in getting this film staring a cast of unknowns to the top of the movie fan’s must see film of 2008 list was a phenomenal achievement. By now we are all familiar with how a trailer for an untitled film appeared ahead of the Transformers movie, the only details included were what turned out to be the US release date ‘1-18-08’ and that it was from the creator of Lost, JJ Abrams. With interest well and truly sparked, all that was left to do was head online for more information, where people found clues, dead-ends and misdirection across a series of sites, some appearing apparently completely random and removed from the film.
The success of the Cloverfield campaign relied heavily on the interest and engagement of the internet audience. It made the consumer a key part of the marketing process, so they immersed themselves within the brand and took interaction to a whole new level. Cloverfield rightly has earned its reputation as a leading example of successful film marketing, it also utilised social networking sites, other more traditional online advertising executions such as homepage takeovers and what frequently gets forgotten; integrated radio, TV and cinema marketing. A campaign such as this requires meticulous planning, you cannot rely entirely on the consumer.
Of course there is a valid argument to suggest that it is easy to take this approach when you have a type of product with the mass brand awareness of a Batman or a Pirates of the Caribbean. A further challenge is creating hype when you have a smaller or even an unknown brand you need to drive awareness of.
A good example of this is the 2008 film from Universal called Untraceable. The website, www.killwithme.com mirrors the storyline of the film where every person who logs onto a website causes a victim of a mass-killer to be lethally injected and gradually killed.
At the Microsoft Advertising roundtable discussion it was suggested that perhaps for an unknown film, it asked a little too much from the consumer and that the drop-off at each stage might have been quite high. The point of a campaign like this, however is that it does enough for someone to tell three or four friends about the film.
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Case Study: Faint Heart
A new British comedy, ‘Faintheart’, that follows a Viking reenactment club looked as though it would become one more script in the abyss of films that never got made, until the production company Vertigo came up with a brand new method of film making. In a revolutionary move online users from the social network, MySpace, were included in the production phase to vote on certain aesthetics of the film.
Jamie Kantrowitz, vice president of marketing for MySpace said ‘It’s the world’s first publicly generated movie. It’s about involving a potential audience for a movie in the making of the film itself’. Residents of MySpace were given the chance to choose a director from the three that were shortlisted by actress Sienna Miller, then partake in auditions for 10 smaller acting roles (20,000 video entries were received), along with voting for their favourite bands to perform 10 songs for the soundtrack.
There were questions of artistic integrity raised, however. With the film being heavily influenced by the online community, there were fears it would be Snakes on Plane 2 – the 2006 film that saw scenes being re-shot to meet blogger requests, but despite which still did not reach the mass audiences expected from the hype. A buzz around a film is never a sure fire guarantee of success, it’s a commodity that some films are lucky to acquire but that will inevitably come back to haunt them if the final product doesn’t deliver on its release. ‘Faintheart’ will surely be the ultimate test to see whether user interaction from a social network on a film production can rejuvenate the attention of British audiences and become the new film trend.
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