Disney Studios is known for their massive marketing budget when it comes to promoting new films, which often runs their return on investment (ROI) much lower than it needs to be in many cases. Other production companies had claimed that a high ROI could not be achieved through social marketing, and Step Up 2 the Streets was essentially Disney’s test product on MySpace to determine if such a campaign would be cost-effective.
- Disney released numerous advertisements on MySpace to spark interest
- Advertisements were not aimed for a hard sell; merely to communicate the brand
- Fans were allowed to communicate to the director and the stars through MySpace
- Over 49% of opening weekend attendees remembered the MySpace ads
By the time that Step Up 2 the Streets launched, Disney had over 156,000 friends on MySpace and several million hits over the course of the campaign. Almost half of the opening weekend respondents remembered seeing the MySpace ads and cited that it was one of the reasons they saw the movie, which was exactly the type of online image Disney had hoped for. More about this study can be found here.
In February of 2010, Sony Pictures launched a comprehensive advertising campaign on Facebook to promote their upcoming movie “Dear John.”
Even though they knew that their ideal target audience was 13 to 24 year old girls, Sony decided to invest in premium ads that would appear on every user’s Facebook account on January 11th, 2010. The promotion featured an interactive campaign that allowed users to answer questions about love, upload personal videos, answer questionnaires, and other types of trivia.
- Promotion of movie “Dear John”
- One day mass campaign to all Facebook users
- Target demographic 13-24 females
Roughly 298,853 people interacted with the ad campaign on January 11th, which was a 1200% increase from the previous day’s total hits. This was also the first Sony film to ever receive a million overall hits on Facebook before the movie release, with much of it coming from word of mouth after the original campaign. Sony estimated an overall 16% increase in fan awareness over the film and a 2% increase is ticket sales. You can view the actual case study here.
Random House launched a website Random Buzzers (http://www.randombuzzers.com) in their initiative to promote a teen-focused book community/social platform that encouraged teens with an interest in writing to interact with their peers in the co-creation of writing projects, engage with Random House authors in weekly discussions, have their reviews featured throughout the official Random House site, and read books exclusively before they hit shelves. The teenage readers were empowered with tools, information, and incentives to facilitate Word of Mouth endorsements. The results were exceedingly positive in the terms that the program received a participation of more than 36,820 teen readers with an average age of 18.5 years. Apart from this, over 17, 500 photos, 5,600 comments and 1,100 book reviews were posted. Case study
Affinitive in collaboration with Random House worked together on a project aimed at promoting a teen-oriented book. Based on the success of the program and demonstrated passion of teen readers, the program was expanded and resulted into the launch of “Random Buzzers” which was a teen-focused book community/social platform. It aimed at creating a network of teenage readers and writers. Random Buzzers provided them information, tools and an opportunity to interact with peers, authors and participate in writing projects. The program has recorded a participation of 36,820 teen readers and counting since its inception and the count is still going on. Case study
To help make teens sensible choices, Edelman designed a program, Keep the Drive that used power of peer influence on the drive. For this, they created a featured MySpace.com profile. It included forum, comment portion and safe driving quiz. Right from the start, the profile had about 900 registrations, 2000 visitors answering the quiz, with 40% answering all correctly. It had 28,000 hits with each visit averaging 4 page views. Case study
Doppleganger in association with BuzzLogic Insights reached out to 13- 24 year olds who are lovers of games and music to launch V-Side. They identified the sites with topics which interested V-Side’s customers and linked them. They also tracked the influential blogs and placed V-Side ads on them. The “Online Gaming” conversation saw thousands of comments posted in more than 100 blogs. This campaign gave them access to remote online customers. Case study
← Older Case Studies
CaseStudiesOnline.com on Twitter
CaseStudiesOnline.com on Facebook
Case Studies by Email
Subscribe via RSS
Tod Maffin, COO and Senior Strategist at