Which movies were the buzz drivers at CinemaCon this year?
The biggest news at CinemaCon, in buzz terms, proved to be Star Wars
Disney will be pleased The Lone Ranger footage was received with loud applause from exhibitors and additionally the buzz levels match this positive response. Johnny Depp’s appearance to introduce the clips also proved effective as a buzz driver.
Interestingly, The Man of Steel trailer has generated significantly more noise outside of CinemaCon with its online debut. Elsewhere Liam Hemsworth and Elizabeth Banks help give The Hunger Games: Catching Fire new trailer on display some online noise, whilst the Fast & Furious 7 announcement gains the franchise some traction online. FastFurious 6 which contributes to its buzz levels. Ender’s Game, aside from Catching Fire, was Lionsgate’s big trailer reveal and they can be happy with the results, particularly the positive blogger reaction.
Which movies generated the most intent to view?
Star Trek topples Star Wars in generating intent to view, expectedly due to the footage shown generating more “I want to see” commentary than the announcement of a Star Wars movie every summer from 2015.
The positive reaction to The Lone Ranger footage is reflected in its increased intent to view. World War Z and Man of Steel similarly rank highly in intent to view.
Which studios generated the most specific social buzz for their presentations?
Given the Star Wars/Lone Ranger response and a Alan Horn, the chairman of Walt Disney Studios, may well have hinted why when he told exhibitors of their tentpole strategy: “There is no other studio that will give you and us in partnership eight tentpole movies a year.”
Universal
Fox’s strong slate was emphasised with previews of The Wolverine, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Rio 2, the ‘oscar bound’ Walter Mitty and Ridley Scott’s next film.
Which studio presentations generated intent to view?
Looking at the mentions of studios (not their titles) and their general slate presentations in creating intent to view, we see Disney and Universal lead again. Paramount Pictures, although lower in overall buzz compared to Warner Bros, generated increased intent to view.
With the winners now announced, we take a country-by-country perspective on how the Academy matched global social meda predictions. By looking at the predictions and aspirations of 7 countries, in their native language, we can reveal how each country predicted the ‘Big Four’ awards and how close they were to matching the Academy.
We also analysed conversation during the red carpet and award ceremony to see who were the king and queen of style in the all important fashion stakes.
Oscar® nominations are a tried and tested route to box office success. But what role does social play in contributing to The Oscar® Bump? We look at which Oscar® nominees are generating the most buzz and what that means for box office sales.
As a marketing tool, there isn’t much that beats an Oscar® nomination. Over the past five years, more than half of the box office sales for Best Picture winners have come after an Oscar® nomination. Likewise, research suggests that a nomination for Best Actor or Best Actress increases box office revenue by nearly $1m.
So what role does social play in driving the increased box office revenue for nominees? By focusing social media buzz around specific actors and movies, the Oscars® gives us a unique opportunity to begin to answer some of the universal questions that the industry has around the role and value of social platforms in movie marketing.
We’ve analysed conversations around nominees for the Best Picture award to see how social media insight can help us segment, understand and engage social audiences.
Check back over the coming weeks as we will be closely monitoring social conversations around these films in the lead up to the Oscars® ceremony on 24th February.
For further information, please contact the team at Way To Blue – info@waytoblue.com
See the infographic here: http://infogr.am/From-Buzz-to-Bump
Facebook has announced todaythat they are now offering an optional new page structure for brands with a global audience.
Welcome to ‘Global Pages’, offering brands, products and films the best of the both worlds.
With this new page structure, fans will either land on the ‘global’ version of a brand page, or be directed to the regional variant where all the conversation posts and content, including the cover photo are tailored to the local market.
The fan count and ‘people talking about this’ are now aggregated and centralised, so these numbers are consistent across all local variants of the brand page. Here’s an example. Search for ‘Frankenweenie’ on Facebook and you are directed to the appropriate page variant (UK in my case). You can switch your region manually and view local content (for France, Italy, Spain, etc) but in all cases you now see the global number of fans in this community and and the total number of people talking about this. Makes sense. Wherever you live around the world, you are part of the Frankenweenie fan community.
What does that mean for brands?
It is likely that Facebook has taken this move to encourage brands and organizations to expand their regional marketing efforts. Research shows that local conversation posts reach a higher percentage of fans (up to five times more) compared to a global conversation post from a big corporate page. Driving better engagement is crucial for Facebook’s business model, as it helps to prove the worth of Facebook ads. More on that in a moment.
With global pages, you will see a higher number of fans, higher number of ‘people talking about this’ (which helps legitimise the brand page), but still with local content for the consumer and local insight for the brand. As the brand or product or film is essentially the same in all countries, it makes sense to gather all fans globally under one roof.
By aggregating the total fan count across the globe, brands can also worry less about their local fan count - now they will feel part of a much bigger community - and more about engagement and strong community management.
As a Facebook page manager, you will now have access to both global and local insights, which will allow more benchmarking and comparisons between markets.
Language targeted Facebook Ads
Another interesting feature for Global pages is the possibility of having not only geo-located Facebook ads, but also language targeted ads. Now we can run the same Facebook ad in multiple languages all directing to the same URL on Facebook.
So, to summarise the main points from this announcement
- You can have a single Page-name (no more “Brand XY Germany”, “Brand XY Italy” etc.), which can be translated if necessary
- Global Pages offer a consolidated total number of fans and number of ‘people talking about this’
- Have a single vanity-URL which can be promoted consistently across all marketing materials, which will save time and money in localisation
- Get both global & local page-insights
- Have a single, locally translated result in all Facebook-searches for the brand, product or film title
- Fans will be assigned a local page by IP-address and other profile-info, the global page serves as fallback.
- Fans are able to manually switch to one particular local page (it’s not currently supported to “like” more than one local page at the same time).
- Global pages are optional and available now! via
Please get in touch with us through @waytoblueuk or info@waytoblue.com to talk about this new opportunity and what it means for your brand.
This week mobile is all the rage. Fact. Yesterday the iPhone 5 was finally unveiled. Earlier in the week the UK’s largest mobile operator Everything Everywhere unveiled a new consumer brand – “EE” – to coincide with the arrival of superfast mobile internet services on 4G. This product and service innovation is being driven by our hunger for mobile data, which is currently experiencing a year on year increase in demand of more than 250% in the UK alone.
Now Facebook is getting in on the act too.
Mark Zuckerberg has given his first interview since the Facebook IPO, back in May. Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, the Facebook founder and CEO said that when it comes to his own social networking, he now does “everything” on his mobile. He admitted to making some ‘big mistakes” with mobile strategy in the past, but his energy is now focused on improving the Facebook mobile experience and finding new ways to grow advertising revenue.
If mobile is at the top of his priority list, making money from search is a very close second. We tuned in for the full half hour interview and here are some of the key take-outs.
Facebook usage on smartphones and tablets is growing rapidly. Mobile users spend a lot more time on Facebook and Zuckerberg claims they are more than twice as likely to use the service every day, compared to desktop only users.
The growth and primacy of the mobile channel is old news, but Facebook made the aforementioned “big mistake” when deciding to develop its services and apps on the big mobile platforms using HTML5.
The decision was taken because HTML5 delivers a consistent user experience, regardless of which device you are using to access Facebook. Unfortunately this benefit was far outweighed by the sluggish, unreliable service and slow data speeds. Developers were unable to significantly improve the mobile user experience or move quickly to grow advertising revenue on mobile devices.
Backing HTML5 as the preferred language for mobile development was a costly mistake for Facebook. Last week we reported that Twitter will earn around $130M from mobile advertising in the U.S. this year – more than double the revenue of Facebook, thanks to a more integrated mobile advertising solution driving higher click through rates than its rival.
So, Facebook has been forced to start over with mobile. The Apple (IOS) app has been rebuilt using ‘native code’ and now delivers a better user experience (it is much faster) and the android version is coming “very soon” These new apps will provide a much stronger base for future development.
In the interview Zuckerberg also claims that users are more likely to interact with mobile ads and so far they are performing better than Facebook ads on the desktop version of the site. Great news for advertisers and shareholders alike.
So mobile is critical to the future of Facebook, but they wont be straying into the handset market anytime soon. Instead their strategy is all about deep integration into mobile devices and operating systems. With the new version of Apple’s IOS6 you will be able to share a photo on Facebook directly from the iPhone camera app and Facebook events will be synchronized with the iPhone calendar. As part of this strategy a Facebook phone simply “doesn’t make sense” according to Zuckerberg.
Making money from search is another matter. Facebook already handles a billion search queries every day. The vast majority of this activity is people trying to find people, followed by searches for brands pages and apps.
Zuckerberg sees a massive future opportunity here, as – based on the knowledge it holds about social groups – there are very specific search queries that Facebook would be capable of answering, such as ‘tell me what sushi restaurants my friends have gone to and enjoyed a good experience in the past few months?’
Once again, good news for advertisers and shareholders at Facebook and a warning shot to Google, who have been integrating their products to improve the relevance of search results, based on deeper knowledge and social interaction.
Zuckerberg praised some of the brand owners that he believes are getting the most value from Facebook’s open graph. Spotify, Nike+, Airbnb and Runkeeper have all used Facebook to increase their distribution and engagement amongst social groups.
Knowing what your friends are listening too, where they are travelling to, or how far they have run today is the life-blood of Facebook and its commercial value. For brands, getting these messages in front of mobile users is critical. Zuckerberg is clear that Facebook is a “mobile company” now, so the big opportunity lies in developing content and services that are optimized for smartphones and tablets. Campaigns that are mobile by design.
High-res
