When ideating on the social campaign for Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third installment of the Avatar franchise, our goal was to differentiate the social creative and connect with fans in a way our past campaigns have not been able to.
We created fan edit-style social videos promoting Avatar: Fire and Ash catered to the TikTok audience and posted them organically and in paid on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Snapchat to tap into the zeitgeist and connect with fans on a global scale.
We had to carefully consider the audience in mind while also developing platform-specific creative.. This led us straight back to TikTok, where fan edits inspired our team to create what Avatar fans wanted for a highly anticipated film.
To bring this vision to life, we worked closely with two agencies, Intermission and Wildcard. After developing the creative, we initially seeded them out to TikTok, where fan edits are native to the platform, to monitor its performance before placing them in other social platforms to test the waters.
Our main challenge was to differentiate the fan-style edits from TV spots, creative content pieces, and our standard social creative. We developed the edits to complement our other creative and cater to the younger audiences we hope to reach. We knew that this in turn would not only engage the fans, but also surprise them in a way that makes them think, “Wait, this is from Avatar: Fire and Ash?!”
The fan-style edits' performance and reception exceeded our expectations. Across the six edits we had created, we received a total of 146 million organic and paid impressions across Instagram Reels, TikTok, and Snapchat.
Our top performing pieces were 'Jake Fancam' which received 1.3 million organic impressions and 31 million paid impressions on TikTok and 8 million impressions on Instagram Reels. 'Transitions' was second in performance, which we posted organically to Instagram Reels and TikTok for a total of 1.2 million organic impressions. From a paid standpoint, it provided 32 million impressions from Instagram Reels and TikTok.
We had also discovered that many users had ripped the edits from these platforms (Instagram Reels, TikTok, and Snap) and had reposted them to other social platforms, as we encountered several on X. We believe our pieces helped boost the excitement for the film, particularly for younger audiences, and encouraged many more users to create edits of their own leading up to the Avatar: Fire and Ash’s release and in sustainment, ultimately leading to the film’s box office success ($1.3 billion and counting).
