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Summer blockbuster season is upon us, and we’re already starting to see some truly innovative social video campaigns coming out of Hollywood. In many ways, movie studios are leading the charge when it comes to social video advertising, using groundbreaking interactive features, creative distribution strategies and original content to successfully drive huge amounts of viewership and sharing. Brands looking to up their social video game will benefit from closely watching Hollywood’s creative approach to online video marketing.
Here are four things that brands can learn from Hollywood when it comes to social video.
1. Think Content, Not Ads
Getting people to watch and share your content requires some fundamental shifts in how marketers think about video advertising. Sharing has to be the starting point when developing content. Hollywood gets it: Great content is their currency. This is one reason why movie trailers were shared 184% more than the industry average for brand video content over the last quarter, as measured by Sharethrough’s distribution network.
For example, to promote the new Muppets movie, Disney released a short original video called “Green With Envy,” a parody of the Rom-Com genre. It has more than 1.4 million views on YouTube alone.
2. Mix It Up
While television and much of online video advertising inventory is limited to 15 or 30-second videos, social video advertising allows for distribution of video content of varied lengths and styles. Hollywood is taking full advantage of the flexibility of this medium to mix in “red band” (read: racy or R-rated) trailers, long-form trailers, interactive videos and viral videos along with their standard trailers to keep things interesting.
For example, a recent red-band trailer for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo did a fantastic job of stirring up buzz. The shaky camera — evoking a sense that the video is a bootleg — added to the intrigue and exclusivity. Many in the marketing and film worlds have expressed their belief that this “bootleg” was created by Sony as part of a campaign intended to go viral. If that’s the case, they’ve even gone so far as to remove it from YouTube on copyright grounds.
Another great example of non-standard content is an amazing interactive YouTube video page for Kung Fu Panda 2, featuring a mix of fun videos of Jack Black and the animated main character, Po. The page’s videos have generated millions of views and nearly 4 million Likes on their Facebook page.
Brands should look to mirror this approach and come up with different versions of the same themed content to reach different audiences and prevent fatigue.
3. Look for Social Distribution
In the old model of TV advertising, demographics ruled. Now, film marketers are going one step further in search of an audience with social influence that is most likely to watch and share their content. For example, Hollywood was early to experiment with the distribution of movie trailers in social games on Facebook, and they are trailblazing the emerging trans-media distribution world. Integrating brand video content into social media is critical to maximize sharing.
With the launch of Facebook’s recent program that enables brands to distribute their videos into over 300 social games (and provides Facebook Credits to users who watch them), any brand marketer can take a page from Hollywood’s play book and get their content in front of hundreds of millions of socially active consumers.
Another good example of cross-media promotion was the addition of an ad for the film Super 8 as a playable level inside the hit video game Portal 2. Game review site Kotaku released a YouTube video about the trailer, which has generated hundreds of thousands of views to go along with the millions of people who played the game.
4. Use Social Analytics to Test Content
Movie marketers were some of the first to embrace social metrics such as “sharethrough rate” — the rate at which a video is shared — in order to quantify success. Data collected from sharethrough rates now help movie studios make informed decisions about which trailers to use for online advertising campaigns, which demographics to include in campaign targeting and even potential markets for film releases. Brands are also beginning to use social metrics as a proxy for the overall success of their campaigns. They should look to further use sharing data to optimize their creative assets and distribution strategies, as well as test new markets for their products.
Chris Schreiber is director of marketing at social video advertising company Sharethrough. A leading expert on social content strategy, Chris will be co-presenting a two-hour workshop on viral video later this month at the Cannes Lions festival, entitled “Making Videos Go Viral: Creative, Social, and Technological Techniques.”
