Here are a few notes towards a social media toolbox, which may be relevant to filmmakers. I'm writing this as a way to wrap my head around what's happening. Please contribute any other ideas in the comments, or links to success stories, online resources, models of best practice.
Build a fanbase during production: tools are your disposal include tweeting during the shoot (which Aussie superhero romcom @Griffthefilm did every day), scheduling a day of live streaming from the set (Aussie shark attack flick @thereefmovie), posting behind-the-scene clips online (Last Ride did this well).
Using Twitter to spread the word is fine, but in the words of film marketing consultant Gordon Paddison, "none of it should be taken lightly (...), be elegant and responsible while at the same time being strategic."
Most tweeters don't want to feel used to push a marketing campaign. Icon, the Australian distributor for Paranormal Activity, replicated the American "tweet your scream" campaign, asking users to tweet about the film for a chance to win DVD's (to build and monitor a community around hashtag #paranormal_oz), even though it was already trending daily thanks to the massive US buzz. The risk: subdividing the fan base and alienating natural word-of-mouth by heavy-handed co-optation efforts. It won't take long before we look back on such Twitter use and think of them as crude and unsophisticated.
More interesting is www.harrypottertweet.com: by allowing fans to do something new (ie: magical) with Twitter, Warner Bros are offering something worth sharing, and thus likely to catch on. Admittedly an operation likes this requires deep pockets, but the lesson here is the shareable factor. The message needs to resonate with the audience and contain enough value to warrant sharing. As marketing guru Seth Godin puts it: "ideas never spread because they are important to the originator".
Involving online communities in the design of the campaign itself is a great idea: nothing encourages fan participation more than giving them the chance to be creative. But again, those you enrol to do what your marketing department should be doing, but for a fraction of the price, must be taken seriously.
IFC launched a competition to design the poster campaign for Antichrist, which was later cancelled, supposedly due to poor legal prep. Would it have worked? Good graphic designers tend to make a living through their work: are they likely to spend days working a potential entry in exchange for very little at all?
The New Zealand distributors of [REC2] asked fans to come up with a marketing campaign of their own, with the best one winning $5,000 (allegedly the film's marketing budget for that territory). Of course the clever move here, is that you don't just get a marketing campaign for a measly five grand, you get as many marketing campaigns as there are competition entries.
Celebrity endorsements are hard to get, but when they happen, they can raise a film's profile significantly (eg: @rainnwilson to his 1.5 million Twitter followers: "If you see one DVD this year, make it THE ROCKER. If you decide on another, make it ANVIL, THE STORY OF ANVIL! http://www.anvilthemovie.com/").
Save on cinema hire and DVD screeners: stream the film to journalists and award-voters in a password-protected environment. Is anyone doing this? Any reason they shouldn't?
Cheap awards campaign? Start a filmmaker-and-fans-led social media campaign. Example: Duncan Jones asking fans of his film MOON to use the #samrockwelloscar tag, sign a petition, buy a campaign t-shirt online or add a twibbon to their Facebook or Twitter avatars. More likely to work if your film is considered to be an underdog.
Book cinemas only when demand warrants it through fan-generated screening requests. When Paramount used eventful to launch Paranormal Activity, it promised a wide nationwide release only if screening requests hit 1,000,000 (which they did, very quickly). My guess is Paramount knew they were going go wide anyway (from the platform release box office figures), but the operation enabled them to gauge demand on a city by city basis, facilitating bookings with exhibitors and optimizing print dispatch. The data necessary to lodge a screening request (from postal code to email address) is also a valuable asset.
This model was first pioneered by indie filmmakers Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, who self-distributed Four Eyed Monsters. The low-budget film (which is great by the way) was one of the first to really harness the internet to deploy a large scale campaign without spending Hollywood dollars.
They did this through smart partnerships (making $20,000 in a week, in referral payments from Spout.com, which gave the filmmakers $1 for each visitor who signed up after watching Monsters online for free). And they did it by facilitating screening requests, something Arin Crumley wants to extend to all indie filmmakers through the new OpenIndie project (itself funded online by future users, through kickstarter.com).
At the end of the day though, it doesn't matter how good a campaign is, a few thing are worth keeping in mind:
- it's easy to get a film to trend on Twitter or collect fans on facebook, much harder to get those same enthusiasts to actually spend the money on a cinema ticket (and transport, parking, popcorn, the babysitter...) once/if the film is released.
- marketing efforts need to be proportional to the quality and playability of the film, not just its perceived or novelty value (Snakes on a Plane anyone?).
- no amount of online marketing is going to create a wide demand for a film if one doesn't already exist on a smaller scale. If you can't sell you film to 100 people, marketing it to 100,000 won't make much of a difference.
- some of the most spectacular viral / word of mouth phenomenons (from The Blair Witch Project to Paranormal Activity) were informed by an element of surprise and a connection with the zeitgeist, which are almost impossible to replicate. Rather than duplicate what's worked in the past it might be better, in other words, to tap into what's happening right now.
UPDATE 11 Nov
- A good example of working with an online community to promote a film is Atlantic Pictures' release of SPLINTERHEADS in partnership of the geocatching community (geocatching - a cool GPS-based hiking and treasure hunting activity - is featured in the film). This included cutting a special trailer especially for geocatchers (240,000 views and counting) and cross-promoting with geocatching.com. Like Paranormal Activity, Splinterheads also use Eventful to enable fan-generated screening requests. Follow @splinterheads to track the film's success (it already appears on 4 geocatching Twitter-lists).
UPDATE 13 Nov
- Check out this interesting post over at Media'ZBiz on social media marketing for film & TV
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2 comments:
Completely agree with all points.
I was wondering if the mere fact that Paranormal Activity had so many free screenings in the past week for uni students was meant to rhetorically show that they had faith in the product above all else.
There's also a 'Demand it' campaign for Boondock Saints 2, but I wonder if this sort of campaign only works for films that an audience would genuinely believe would be not shown for potential violence/horror/etc. Does this play into building the machine for the scandal of the event-type cinema?
-Kathleen
I think Paramount (and Icon in Australia) had huge faith in Paranormal Activity's ability to deliver on word-of-mouth. A lot of their campaign (from free advance screenings to 1-million-requests-and-we'll-go-wide) would have backfired if the film wasn't good/scary enough.
The demand-it campaigns only work if there is a perceived scarcity, the illusion that supply will not meet demand. I don't think anyone's betting on the (perceived) possibility a film might get banned. It's more to do with the fact that people who don't live in the big cities (residents, in Us-speak, of the "flyover states") often do miss out on indie films, which can only afford so many prints.
For bigger Hollywood films, when there is no doubt prints will be dispatched to the tiniest towns, the distributors have another scarcity strategy: lie through their teeth. A limited 2-week run was advertised in the US for the Hannah Montana concert film, for Toy Story 1& 2 3D and for Michael Jackson's This Is It, only to be extended once the cash rolls in.
Scarcity in a liberal economy? Please.
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