Whilst viral marketing can be crucial to the success of low budget, independent films (low-cost, reaches target audience), major Hollywood studios producing big budget blockbuster movies - like The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 - are increasingly using viral marketing to target their audience (the 15-24 demographic, who use social networking most frequently and younger children, who have grown up with the internet and are familiar with sites such as YouTube).
Below are a series of posters and trailers that have been released alongside the more traditional forms of advertising (like the conventional poster above), that have been used to try and expand The Hunger Games universe. I have also included links to some of the sites used in the viral marketing campaign and other sites related to the film, so that you can look at them in more detail - this sort of detailed example would be excellent in any response to questions in Section A of the AS exam.
The viral marketing campaign began with the release of a teaser trailer for the film on the movie's official Facebook and YouTube sites in July 2014 (four months before the release of the film in cinemas). Prior to this though, in May 2014 TheHungerGamesExclusive.com was launched featuring stills of some of the film's main characters and short video interviews with some of the actors. A teaser poster and a page from the script of the film were also released on the site - making it a site that the fans would return to over and over again to find more information regarding the movie.
Alongside the traditional marketing techniques, such as the main cast appearing for a photo-call at the Cannes Film Festival (guaranteeing that the pictures would make newspapers around the globe, despite the film not even showing at the festival), the pace of the viral marketing campaign picked up with the release of a fake "government" website for Panem (the fictional world where the franchise takes place) called TheCapitol.PN.
The site had been used for the previous two films in the franchise. The website encouraged users to sign up, as "citizens of Panem", so that they would receive regular updates from Capitol TV - which essentially broadcast a series of fake Public Service Announcements - such as those included below.
The studio created partnerships with other social media including Yahoo and Tumblr through which they released the "District Heroes Collection", a series of posters representing many of the 13 Districts featured in the film series.
The first of the PSAs was released on June 25th 2014 and quickly became the most watched trailer in the USA in the last week of June, also trending as the most popular video on YouTube in both Australia and Canada.
A second PSA was released on July 9th 2014, again featuring President Snow BUT this time the announcement is hijacked and interrupted by a character from the second film stating that "the mockingjay lives" and that a revolution is under way. Within minutes of the release of this second PSA #TheMockingjayLives and #2 - Unity became the top two trending topics worldwide on Twitter.
When the film's official teaser trailer was released on July 28th, on the film's Facebook and Youtube accounts, again within minutes #MockingjayTeaserTrailerToday, #OurLeaderTheMockingjay and #OfficialTeaserTrailer became worldwide trending topics on Twitter.
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