To use creativity with technology, in order to even the odds in a box office battle
There is only one Indian emotion that is common to all geographies and communities: Bollywood.
No matter what time of year it is, what part of the world one is in, or even how one’s life is going, if there’s new Bollywood content, it will be consumed en masse.
When it comes to movie marketing, promoters bank on the star power and adopt a blanket mass advertising approach, with the intent of gaining max visibility.
Good Newwz, the movie we were tasked with promoting, had A-list actor Akshay Kumar, and seasoned actress Kareena Kapoor.
The challenge, however, was to create consideration and excitement for Good Newwz, in the face of the most anticipated film of the year – Dabangg 3. With significantly lower budgets for both production and marketing, Good Newwz was a distinct David to Dabangg 3’s Goliath, and therefore needed something special to creatively close the massive gap in media spends.
Enter Unlk (Yu-ni-link), proprietary White Rivers Media technology that changes the way we not only target digital audiences, but also serve content to them.
An AI-powered MarTech solution that
a) allows a movie marketer to identify what a user finds most interesting/compelling about a movie, and
b) present content relevant to said user’s interests in a sequential manner across multiple social and digital platforms.
And so, we broke away from the industry norm of spraying media and praying for views, instead focused our efforts on only the most ardent fans of Akshay Kumar, Kareena Kapoor, and the comedy genre.
Imagine for a moment (please and thank you!) that you are an Akshay Kumar fan, and you have a friend who’s a Kareena Kapoor fan.
Both of you watch the trailer for Good Newwz, by clicking a URL that was powered by Unlk.
Thereafter, you will be automatically targeted with marketing content featuring Akshay, while your friend will be targeted with marketing content featuring Kareena.
Wherever you may be online, on any social media or surfing on web, Unlk will ensure you are targeted with each successive content piece featuring Akshay, so that you don’t miss a thing!
Unlk was used for poster releases, trailer and teaser releases, by celebrities who posted the content online. So when their fans clicked the link, each one began their own multi-platform sequential journey.
We kept this up right until ticket bookings opened, so that hype for the movie was sustained until points of sale went live.
And that’s not all.
Enter Unitrack (pronounced just the way you think), a facet of Unlk that uses Natural Language Processing for sentiment analysis across 1 million data points per asset launch. This told us in detail everything that was liked, disliked, and wanted more of by every fan who spoke about the film before its release.
So if you reacted positively to Akshay’s body for the film, we’d target you with videos of his workouts that got him into shape for the film.
Similarly, if your friend reacted positively to Kareena’s outfit in the trailer, we’d target you with a video of her various looks in the film.
Hypotheticals aside, since the majority of fans reacted positively to the comedy in the trailer, we cut a new edit comprising of the funniest bits and so on. A lot of fans were excited for Kareena’s return to the big screen, so we lined up more interviews for the lovely leading lady to give her more visibility through fresh content.
These real-time creative decisions allowed us to create a campaign where
a) the creatives were what the fans wanted to see,
b) the content was what the fans wanted to read, and
c) the videos were what the fans wanted to consume, therefore
the campaign universe became one that the fans wanted to experience.
And that, is how our highly tactical David beat Goliath.
Know more - http://bit.ly/UnlkByWhiteRiversMedia
Numbers always paint a truer picture than words, so we’ll let them tell you how we changed the Indian movie marketing model for better:
CTR (Click-Through Ratio) without Unlk: 0.94 %
CTR with Unlk: 2.36%
This shows a whopping 250% growth in CTR.
Complete video views without Unlk: 26.66%
Complete video views with Unlk: 56.91%
That amounts to an incredible 210% increase in video view duration.
View rate without Unlk: 29.24%
View rate with Unlk: 50.48%
This confirms a jaw-dropping 170% growth in view rate.
That’s how we enabled the makers of Good Newwz, Dharma Productions, to significantly increase audience engagement without any change in media expenditure whatsoever.
That’s how we beat Goliath, and in turn created a potentially global movie marketing model for the years to come.
*K.O.*
