We are just 1 day away from Friday's official release of "The Hunger Games." The first film based on the immensely popular Suzanne Collins trilogy opens Friday March 23, and the online buzz is louder than ever.
But, it takes a determined and very clever marketing team to create that digital hype and keep it going strong.
Lionsgate's 21 member marketing staff carefully and methodically set out to build a tremendous following. A phased, yearlong digital effort built around the online platforms young audiences are glued to.
The mega-marketing team utilized Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, fan blogs, iPhone games and Yahoo to live stream the premier. Twitter played a major role in this campaign. Fans were able to discover a website through Twitter where they could make digital ID cards as if they lived in the movie's futuristic society Panem.
More than 800,000 people have created those cards. They were even allowed run for mayor of Panem and campaign online.
Top execs say one of the biggest challenges was promoting a movie with such disturbing subject matter. Kids killing kids in order to survive in a post apocalyptic world for the sake of televised entertainment. The solution? Don't show any of the violence in the promos, and if fans want to see "the games," they need to buy a ticket.
Another cool marketing tool they used, about 100 days before the movie's release, the studio created a poster cut into 100 puzzle pieces, then gave digital versions of those pieces to 100 Web sites and asked them to post their puzzle piece on Twitter.
Fans had to actually search Twitter to piece together this poster. The result was a worlwide trend on Twitter within minutes. Very creative and obviously very effective.
WKYC-TV
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