It’s now the final week of our Digital Distribution module and the film has been released, we’re still posting to social media to try and maintain interest in the film, but with one day left we’re essentially at the end of the project.

I think that all in all our project has gone well, with our three pronged approach to social media marketing we managed to incorporate some interesting and creative ideas. When we first started the project in our presentation we had a lot of different ideas with a more ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’ approach, Rob quickly let us know what was good and what needed trimming and we had our main two ideas; a competition to find a coded message in a number of 360* photos and an instagram account from the perspective of our main character. The whole group went out to shoot the photos in week 3 and we were pleased with how they came out. We initially started off posting quite slowly on both accounts and ended up not getting properly underway until around week 5 or so. I started posting a lot more frequently on the facebook account, not just including the competition photos that Matt was posting, but adding other posts including making polls, posters, teaser videos and a cover video. I think that varying these posts is an important way of keeping our audience engaged.

The night before the release date Matt released the final 360 photo for the twitter account that hosted his trailer for the film; I think that this last minute trailer release was a good idea as it kept excitement up for people up until the day before.

At the same time as this Matt and I were posting pretty consistently on the instagram account; Matt was posting pictures of the doll in various locations and I did a photoshoot with Matt Keen for things to post. The idea was that Lewis, the character, was losing his mind more as we got closer to the film; after the release date I posted some new things acting as if he had committed the crime in the film on the films release date and that after this the instagram account had been taken over by someone else who was using it to spread information about the crime- a ‘seeking information’ poster and news article which I photoshopped together.

After the release date on the facebook account we kept up with some new posts to keep people interested and hopefully get some more people going to watch the film including a follow up to the competition, links to where people can watch the film and reviews from those who have seen it so far.

All in all I am pleased with how our project went, I think that we managed to incorporate some original ideas and marketed our film well. If we did it again I think we could definitely improve by starting to post earlier on as we could’ve gotten more content out to our audience as well as improving on our in class pitch; being more creative and having a more concrete idea when we presented.

I had a lot of fun working on this project!

One of the most effective viral marketing techniques is experiential marketing, also known as engagement marketing; staging pranks or shows out on the streets (often videoed as well). This type of marketing creates hype out on the streets as it causes anyone involved or nearby to immediately start asking questions; “what is this for?” as well as being some of the most successful marketing videos as people like to see the reactions of other real people.

One example of this type of marketing is the setup hosted to promote carrie (2013) where a coffee shop was rigged so that objects and people would be seemingly telekinetically controlled by an actor in order to scare customers.

This was a hugely successful example of this type of marketing; racking up over 70,000,000 views on youtube (not including it’s full reach with reposted videos and shares on social media). Horror filmmakers quickly caught on that this style of campaign goes hand in hand with the genre due to the shock factor available of bringing paranormal goings on to life in the real world.

An example of real-world movie marketing on a longer timescale is Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 film District 9 which was marketed with an extensive campaign that featured posters, billboards and bus signs from the film showing apparent government warnings about aliens. These posters didn’t reveal any real details about of the film- even the name; they only had web addresses and phone numbers which would lead to fake recordings and websites from companies in the film.

One of the positives of this campaign is that, again, it encourages people to ask more questions, a key to marketing out on the streets is making it last in people’s minds, if someone was to look at this poster, be confused, go into read more and see it’s just a movie poster they’ll pretty quickly forget about it. If they look closer and find nothing but a phone number, they’re more likely to keep thinking about it and ring the number to discover what’s going on; once again encouraging people to share their own photos and videos on social media. This campaign turned out to be a huge success as proven by the films box office numbers, earning over 200 million dollars from just a 30 million dollar budget.

A much earlier example of publicity stunts in movie marketing is the cubicle stunt pulled for the 1999 film “Office space” where a man was suspended in a glass cubicle doing office work above times square for an entire week. This was an ambitious and effective bit of marketing for an equally effective movie that sought to question the monotony faced by office workers that has had a huge impact on pop-culture, actually causing lots of people to quit their jobs. This is a stunt that clearly had a lot of thought and meaning behind it, this type of marketing was very new at the time it was done and probably seemed more like a david blaine stunt to most people when it first happened.

For our distribution project we decided to use three different campaign styles: a traditional promotional facebook, a follow along game with 360º photos to find a code to unlock a secret trailer; and finally an instagram account from the perspective of the films main character following his descent into the madness we see in the film.

The facebook page is for more traditional promotional techniques- behind the scenes photos, movie posters, and countdown posts building hype towards the final release date.

This type of promotion is the basis of any good marketing campaign, while experimental ideas and using new technologies are interesting and very useful, it’s important to have a grounding in more traditional and proven marketing styles and techniques. As well as posting visual promotional material we have been trying to engage our audience with a more personal or casual voice in text posts.

Our Instagram account is from the perspective of Lewis, the films protagonist and is meant to follow his story leading up to the narrative of the film with the events that take place in the film taking place on our release date (29th March). The idea is that the audience can understand Lewis’s twisted mindset as he starts out as a normal guy, finds the doll, becomes more and more obsessed with it and starts doing dark things, believing that the doll is doing them. We plan to post photos of dead birds that the doll has supposedly killed and to dress Matt (the actor) like the doll.

The instagram account was inspired by marketing campaigns like ‘The Blair Witch Project’ which had online marketing campaigns acting as if the characters and story of the film were real, while we weren’t directly trying to trick anyone (it is much harder to do this now after films like Blair witch and so many others have already) we thought it is still an engaging idea that the audience can follow along with.

Our final idea is the game/ hunt that we have included on our facebook page; We have been posting 360º photos that show the doll hidden somewhere in the image with a letter photoshopped onto it, if people find every letter from all the photos it spells out the name of a twitter account where we are hosting a secret trailer for the film.

This idea was inspired by campaigns like the one for ‘The Dark Knight’ that featured a huge online/ real world game, encouraging players to uncover clues, while our game is obviously on a much smaller scale we still think it will be a good way to keep audiences interested and keep traffic returning to the facebook page so people can keep up with the latest part of the code which has been released.

After the film has been released we plan to continue posting on both of our social media platforms, the game will have ended by then but we want to continue with the instagram account, posting fake account shut-down posts from instagram and person of interest/ wanted posters from the police. On the Facebook page we will keep hype going by eventually releasing the secret trailer to everyone and continuing to remind people where they can see the film as well as posting reviews.