Fox Home Entertainment has positioned The Fault in Our Stars DHD as the must-own young adult film of the year. We creatively sought to educate teens of the benefits and convenience of Digital HD while standing out in the increasingly competitive space of young adult film adaptations. We were tasked with creating an innovative, engaging campaign that would showcase the themes of the film, cut through the competitive clutter and allow us to educate users about the new Digital HD format — all while driving purchase intent.
Our strategy was to employ a heavy social presence, reaching our audience in its most endemic "digital" environment. By amplifying presence across all social platforms, including being the FIRST Home Entertainment studio on Instagram, we separated ourselves from the theatrical campaign on a new social platform. We also had to be mindful of timing as our flight ran through Labor Day weekend, immediately after the MTV VMA's and during the finale of Pretty Little Liars, all notable events that draw big spends. With limited budget, we focused on mobile heavy placements and aligned with watercoolerconversation to stay relevant.
Our campaign exceeded performance across all KPI benchmarks and verticals. Socially, we achieved an engagement rate well over 10% on a platform where users have historically shown negative sentiment about advertising. Reaching over 5MM F13-17 users with custom content, we saw primarily positive feedback within the comments. Facebook achieved a 6.5% ER (surpassing our 2.5% benchmark) followed by Tumblr driving over 3.0% ER.
The highly popular and successful film that tells Hazel's story, The Fault in Our Stars, is inspired by its namesake novel written by John Green. Within its theatrical window, the movie grossed over $303M worldwide ($125M Domestic and $178M International). Our job was to carry that success over into the fairly unknown medium of Digital High Definition (Digital HD). Once we dug in, we realized that the low awareness of the Digital HD platform amongst our primary target (females 13–17) would be the first of several challenges. We had to find a way to separate ourselves from the theatrical campaign while reaching the same F13-17 audience. Our main goal was to aim for strong presence and efficiencies during a time of heavy saturation in the market against other YA films (The Giver and Divergent). Additionally, our flight fell during Labor Day weekend, the Pretty Little Liars' season finale and after MTV VMA's, all high volume events for advertisers — well above our limited budget (less than $500K).
Strategically, by anchoring our campaign with Instagram, we managed to successfully reach users on a new platform. We brought a Fox First opportunity to the Home Entertainment clients while tailoring our creative to align with Instagram's strict guidelines and best practices. Most importantly we had to heavily negotiate exceptions to getting our branding and purchase messaging across. As the app is 100% mobile, we were able to engage teens who are constantly on their devices and on-the-go, allowing us to reach users during the Labor Day holiday. We then rounded out our plan with interest targeting around relevant popular teen shows on Facebook to surround chatter around the Pretty Little Liars' finale.
We created nine new pieces of content exclusively for the Instagram audience. Of the nine pieces of creative, four ran during the Digital HD window, and the remaining five were staggered out during the Blu-ray/DVD window. Our creative had to connect with our teen audience while touching upon the sensitive subject of cancer — all our key art consisted of the film's star, Hazel, wearing a nasal cannula, a permanent fixture in the film and ostensibly, her life. The Instagram creative was paired with inspirational quotes from the film focusing on love, life and positive reinforcement while including tailored captions to remind users to purchase. Through Instagram, we would be able to reach our target audience with one piece of unique creative imagery per day to avoid creative fatigue. This helped keep our content fresh and top of mind while reaching female teens.
Overall, our Instagram campaign achieved a 10.4% ER, successfully surpassing the 7.5% ER generated by Fox Theatrical's Maze Runner Instagram campaign, which was targeted to a similar teen audience. Tumblr drove a high 3.15% ER, over indexing against 2014 Fox Home Entertainment titles, and drove an additional 1.2K new followers within our 7-day DHD flight! We then rounded out our social campaign with Facebook, which generated an overall 6.5% ER (outperforming our 2.5% internal benchmark), with the Pretty Little Liars targeted video post garnering a 12.5% ER! We saw successes across all social fronts!
More notably, we were able to measure positive sentiment for the campaign through comments such as, "This is the only 'promoted' thing I don't mind" and "They are finally understanding what type of ad I like". This was quite a feat considering how vocal Instagram users are of ads on the platform.
Fox was just as excited for the Digital HD campaign:
"No tears will be shed for the sales results on The Fault in Our Stars! After an awesome launch on DHD, the title is tracking 12% above its digital, which is overshadowed only by its phenomenal physical performance, currently tracking 30% above its ultimate and one of the strongest converters in the YA genre to date." -20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. The Fault in Our Stars has positioned itself as the first major movie title to drive younger moviegoers to embrace Digital HD.