What is the key to attract the audience to a movie? What are the marketing strategies that the film studios are using to be the leaders of the box office during a period of time? Now the audience is demanding more. The people just do not want to limit their experience to the duration time of the movie. They want to create a connection with the stories and the characters. The traditional ways to publicizing a film, such as showing the trailer in theaters and publishing articles in magazines and journals, are still working. However, the digital and social media have been increasing the importance in the movie marketing. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram are new allies on the film promotion.
Lionsgate, for example, designed a campaign for the release of The Hunger Games in which they invited teenagers to register on Facebook, Twitter, play games, and join communities related with the movie story. This campaign is a perfect example of the importance to create a link with the audience beyond viewing the movie. It is to completely involve the movie follower in the movie world. Other successful campaigns include creating blogs of the movies, viral videos, ipad and smartphones applications. The key is always interaction.
A recent example is the aggressive digital marketing campaign of The Lego Movie by Warner Bros. Even though the movie release was on February 7 2014, the campaign started since the previous year. Besides the teaser trailer exhibition on YouTube, they created a web page to give fans the chance to build their own Lego figure. On Facebook they created competitions, such as “Fan of the Week” and they shared photos of the fans with the movie stands in the theaters.
The digital media is not only a source for creating the campaigns. It is also an important tool for getting indicators and data to analyze the impact of a movie on the market. With statistics like Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Google searches and trailer views, it is possible to predict the box office results. The Lego Movie box office results this weekend were very good and the results are attributed largely to the marketing campaign. The digital media is a new option to promote the movies and have a closer relationship with the customer.
