email print share on Facebook share on Twitter share on LinkedIn share on reddit pin on Pinterest

Sarah Calderon • The Film Agency

"It is easier to attract the attention to a film while it is actually in a festival"

- Which online marketing strategies have been used to promote the film Omar?

What was your marketing strategy to promote the film Omar on the social networks?

I started The Film Agency a year ago. Through this company I am focusing on new marketing strategies for film. Therefore, I am trying to offer producers, sales agents, and distributors different innovative strategies that they can use at the different stages of the film production, especially at early stages, in order to position the film so that they do not arrive at the stage of distribution without having anything. In this framework, I have launched a service for sales agents to do social media management during the festivals. Actually, I did this for The Match Factory for the first time for Omar and it was a very interesting experience because our hypotheses were right: indeed, it is easier to attract the attention to a film while it is actually in a festival. In this particular case it was very successful because, besides the film-lover audience, we also had the support of the pan Arab community that was very engaged. We did a very low budget campaign for ads on Facebook, we created some content for the objectives of the festival and we started to raise fans exponentially. It was very quick. Within a month, we achieved 13300 fans whose high replication factor allowed us to reach more than 1 million people in that short period of time. 

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Did you only take care of the marketing for the Cannes film festival or also afterwards? 

Before, during, and after the festival, because the film got the Un Certain Regard Jury Award.  We were thus able to place a few more Facebook Ads about it and reach more people. 

Did you use Twitter as well?

Yes, we used Twitter, which was very useful for the press replication during the festival. We were basically able to tweet everything that was coming up during the festival and the comments of people. Fortunately, the film had great reviews and comments all over so this helped a lot. It was also very useful during the coverage of events such as the main screening and the award ceremony. We were able to publish pictures and videos on real time. 

An interesting dimension is that we really worked closely with the producers. We gave them an administrator access and they were able to upload, on their own, pictures that they took of themselves at whatever time in Cannes. This was really engaging for the community because they were able to have a very specific site on Cannes that is not a professional one. Pictures and ambiance that were involving the audience in a familiar way.

What kind of audience did you touch thanks to Facebook?

On Facebook and generally online, you really need to know whom you are going to talk to, before you start any campaign. Otherwise your money will just go, spread in so many ways on the Internet that you would not get any results. Consequently, we had a very specific approach. We did two campaigns. On the one hand we did one for the film-lover world. We involved people who like Sundance film festival or Berlinale, who watched Paradise now or other similar films. On the other hand we targeted the pan Arab community through different web pages such as I like Dubai City, I like Abu Dhabi or even large and active communities concentrated on the Arab spring pages. And that was the key. The second campaign, the pan Arab one, worked much better than the other one and it allowed us to see that the community that would support the film would be them. They are the ones who are spreading the message because they see the film as theirs and as their own support of militancy act in a way. 

So your audience was specifically targeted?

Of course. That is something we really need to do in any campaign and particularly for the ones on the Internet. If we would have spent the budget on open age group such as women between 18 and 40 I do not think that we would have had that kind of exposure. You have to look for communities that are really engaged. Actually I have worked on campaigns that have had much more budget, that have had much more advertising on Facebook and Google, even a recognized cast, and the results were not even close to those of Omar.

Is it different to promote an Arab film? Have you ever done it before? 

I never promoted Arab films before, but whenever you are doing marketing you need to ask yourself who is the fan of this film, who is going to support this film. If you can answer that question I guess you have an audience. For example, the same thing is true of the LGBT films. You can target the LGBT community who will spread the word and make a larger number of people go to see the film. Specific communities are really strong on the Internet nowadays and the Arab one is among the strongest. 

What are the next steps to sell the film? 

The next step with The Match Factory is to involve the distributors of the film with the Facebook page. They are thinking about it and how to regulate the process. My suggestion was that they add the distributors as administrators of the page so that they can also post when the film will be released in their country. Now that they have this really good fan base, I guess it is the moment to cooperate with distributors so the effort focalizes on local audiences and impact. The Film Agency is using the same kind of strategy with Viramundo and Magnifica Presenza, the first two titles released by The TIDE Experiment (day-and-date at Pan-European level project supported by the Media Programme). We invite the distributors in the release team to join the Facebook Page as administrators. We have a common calendar, which they translate and post daily on a geo-localized basis. There are probably several other ways to do it. You can also engage a centralized community manager who takes care of it all in the long term. 

Have you had a say on the visibility material?

Not in this case. Sometimes I do because I do other types of marketing consultancy but in this case, we started to work two weeks before Cannes and it would have been too complicated to do so. I really focused on social media management. 

So your work was really focused on the promotion at the Cannes Film Festival?

Exactly, as people hire a press agent for a festival, I think that nowadays, they should also hire a social media manager because it is the moment when films are going to probably have the most exposure than at any other point. It is also easier to drag attention when you have stories and relevant contents. Is a way to exploit the B2B exposure beyond the walls of the festival itself. 

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Did you enjoy reading this article? Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more stories like this directly in your inbox.

Privacy Policy