Archive for the ‘Hunger’ tag
11 innovative movie marketing campaigns
Innovative campaign no. 1: “The Hunger Games” team created a vast secret virtual world for fans
Today’s movie fans want more than a two-hour experience. They’re hungry to dive into immersive interactions with the characters and worlds. Movie marketers are tapping into this energetic brand loyalty by creating explosive, innovative digital campaigns like this massive digital extension of the blockbuster “The Hunger Games.”
As fans know, every year in the ruins of what was once North America, the evil Capitol of the nation of Panem forces each of its twelve districts to send a teenage boy and girl to compete in the Hunger Games. Fans went crazy for this story in book form (23.5 million copies in print), movie form ($673 million worldwide gross billings, to-date), and digitally. Here’s the uber-cool, uber-realistic experience created by the movie’s marketing team.
Many of our clips today come from Peter Stougaard. Peter was the SVP Creative Advertising at 20th Century Fox for 12 years where he managed campaigns for the films “Xmen,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” “Cast Away,” “Moulin Rouge,” “Ice Age,” “Minority Report,” “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Borat,” “Night at the Museum,” “The Simpson’s Movie,” James Cameron’s “Avatar,” and many more. He is currently the co-founder of ActivateTV.
Thirst Aims To Slake Your Hunger For Relevant Twitter Content
Is the Twitter platform about to get a second wind of dedicated apps?
In the last few weeks, I’ve seen a handful products that are starting out by filtering out the most relevant news stories, videos and photos from people’s personal streams. Thirst is one of them and it’s coming out with an iPad app today. The company is backed by nearly $1 million from investors including BlueRun Ventures, former Powerset chief operating officer Steve Newcomb and DCM general partner Jason Krikorian. It was started by two recent Berkeley graduates, Anuj Verma and Kunal Modi.
Although Thirst is starting out on the Twitter platform, the company is really more about natural language processing technology. The Twitter iPad app is more of a proof of concept around whether its NLP processor works well. Verma says that it’s really difficult to keep up with information shared through Twitter and there has to be a better way of surfacing the most important news. Thirst uses a custom natural language processor to pick out the most important stories around different keywords or subjects like ‘gay marriage’ (because of this past week’s big announcement from President Barack Obama in support of it).
The issue though, is how big any individual company like this can become. The biggest exits that the Twitter platform has spawned to date are, well, relatively small. Tweetdeck went to Twitter for between $40 to 50 million. Contrast that to the biggest iOS acquisition to date, which is Instagram, or Zynga, the most successful Facebook platform company to date. You could argue that recent M&A deals like Instagram and OMGPOP owe something to the Twitter platform because the social network was a growth channel for both apps, but it’s hard to say how much of their success was derived from the Twitter platform. There are also plenty of iPad-based news readers like Flipboard, Pulse and News.me that serve as competition for Thirst.
Again, Verma says Twitter is just a start. And there are plenty of other places that Thirst could go.
Thirst for Twitter from Thirst on Vimeo.
Experience marketing: Hunger Delivery
Food delivery services used as an advertising media. At first, it doesn’t sound like a super innovative idea, but bear with me, because I’m not talking just about printing your promotional message on the cover of the pizza box. After the spectacular Alcatraz campaign in Spain, today we have another execution that uses food delivery to create an experience and not just deliver an advertising message.
In order to make people understand how bad it feels to be hungry, the Food Bank Foundation in Paraguay made a deal with the two biggest pizzerias in Asunción: on a Friday night they were asked to deliver their pizza with significant delay. When the pizzas got delivered, complaining customers found this message in the box: when you’re hungry, you understand hunger. This pizza is free so you can contribute what you can to help the national food campaign.
The agency is TBWA/Oniria.
With the Right Foods, Staying Full While Dieting Is Easier Than You Think [Health]
If you’re trying to watch what you eat, or your doctor’s put you on a diet, you know what it’s like to struggle with gnawing hunger even though you’re all out of calories for the day. Sure, chugging a few glasses of water and going to bed may help keep you from raiding the fridge before the sun comes up, but being hungry still sucks. Thankfully, the blog Syatt Fitness has a great list of foods you can eat and enjoy even if you’re counting calories. More »
Social Media Case Study: Walmart’s Fight Hunger Contest
Guest post by @Lisa Loeffler, Research & Analysis Lead at Convince & Convert. She is also founder and principal of Genuine Media, a marketing agency that helps clients build their individual and brand reputation through social media.
You can’t always see it and many don’t talk about it, but hunger is a daily, global struggle.
To support the anti-hunger movement Walmart, the Walmart Foundation, and some of the nation’s largest food companies like General Mills, ConAgra Foods, Kraft Foods and Kellogg Company launched an integrated marketing campaign to help raise food donations during spring when food bank supplies dwindle, and need surges.
YouTube video highlighting the Fight Hunger Campaign
Using social media as a central component to promote the program, Walmart customers were invited to visit Walmart’s Facebook Contest page to vote for one of 200 communities hardest hit by unemployment.
The community that tallied the most votes was awarded $1 million to help fight hunger. The next 20 communities each received $50,000 for hunger relief.
After a visitor voted they could view what towns were leading and how many votes they had, in real time.
The contest spurred several food banks across the US to create public relations campaigns and they encouraged residents in their areas to vote to increase their chances of winning.
There was a lot of media coverage at the local level, like this contest article in a Youngstown, OH newspaper.
Walmart Hunger Relief Leaderboard (at time of writing on 4/28)
Supporters also took to Twitter to help promote their favorite town. Here’s a sample of Youngstown contest supporters:
Along with video and Facebook, Walmart integrated its Fight Hunger campaign throughout its stores with signage that drove people to visit Facebook and vote for their community. This is excellent, as too often social media isn’t supported in three dimensions.
The campaign’s food manufacturer partners also created custom packaging on some of their products to also promote the program in Walmart stores and neighborhood markets.
Drum roll….. And the winner of Walmart’s Fight Hunger Contest with more than 98,000 votes was Youngstown-Warren, Ohio. The rest of the winners and the story.
Congratulations to Youngstown, OH for showing how a small town with a population of 73,000 can come together and out-vote large urban centers with millions of people, and win for their cause.
Want to support your local food bank? Visit Feeding America for more information. http://feedingamerica.org/foodbank-results.aspx
Social Media for Social Good – A Bright Future
Today’s technology and social media advancements around fundraising have leveled the field. While it’s brought accessibility to a wider pool of donors for the nonprofits that want to leverage it, it has also put philanthropy and social responsibility for corporate giants, like Walmart, under a larger microscope.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a global philanthropy or a small nonprofit at the local level. If you understand, utilize and capitalize on the power of social media for social good you have the ability to get in front of thousands, and perhaps millions of people like never before.
This great social (media) shift is helping corporate giants with philanthropic ambitions become more human and allows the local nonprofit to become more accessible.
How has social media helped make your small- or mid-sized nonprofit more public and accessible? If you’re a large corporation how are you leveraging social media to showcase your corporate social responsibility?
Kindle Ad for Third ‘Hunger Games’ Book Spoils the First Two
Spoiler alert! Warning! Warning! Spoilers ahead! OMG! If you read on, your life will be spoiled and not worth living! Amazon is taking some heat for a Kindle billboard in Washington, D.C., that shows the first page of Mockingjay, the final book, released in 2010, in Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy. Problem is, the page reveals key plot points of the previous two books, theoretically spoiling them for potential readers. Even more spoiling ensued when an Instagram pic of the sign hit Twitter (see the photo after the jump), and from the attendant media coverage. It makes sense that the spoiler mentality is so pervasive in the social-media age, when unwanted revelations enter streams and feeds unbidden, and nothing stays a secret for more than three seconds. Still, the Hunger Games books have been out for years, their twists and turns analyzed, rehashed and debated online and off, so Amazon's goof doesn't seem like a big deal. It's all extra publicity, in fact, as if the series really needs more of that. Think of it as a cost- and time-saving service. Knowing the secrets of books one and two, you can skip to book three. Oh, by the way: Rosebud is a sled. Well, I promised spoilers, didn't I?
Tips and Tools for Blogging? I’ll Take a Baker’s Dozen.
You can’t type in a query without being faced with a wall of blogs. Whether they are official company thoughts (sales pitches), fashion icon musings, or personal rants about the intricacies of the Hunger Games saga, everyone has something to say. In 2012, the likelihood of most of the people reading this article has their [...]
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10 Social Marketing Lessons from The Hunger Games
10 Lessons from The Hunger Games
originally published in MediaPost’s Social Media Insider
When you read or watched “The Hunger Games,” did you catch all the lessons for social media marketers? Any story about a post-apocalyptic society sacrificing 23 teenagers annually was clearly written with marketers in mind.
Maybe that’s not the case, but there’s still plenty marketers can learn. Before getting into it, there are two things you need to know. First, there are a lot of spoilers here. I may well have spoiled everything. Next, I only watched the movie. I tried reading the first book twice and couldn’t get into it. If you’re a purist, I’m sorry, but I have no clue how faithful the movie was to the book.
Enough caveats. Here are 10 lessons coming all the way from Panem, the nation featured in “The Hunger Games”:
1) Know your strengths. Heroine Katniss is the archer. Her cohort Peeta could pin Hulk Hogan. Figure out what your brand’s strengths are and play to them.
2) Being nice reaps dividends. Katniss wasn’t the most approachable contender, but she needed a crash course in charm school. As a marketer and a brand, there has to be some reason for your target audience to like you. If there isn’t, then you have work to do before diving into social media.
3) Promote your assets. One of the heroes of the film, Cinna, is a stylist, so “Project Runway” junkies have someone to root for. Cinna aids Katniss and Peeta by dressing them in opening night attire that everyone notices. Cinna knows that it doesn’t matter who has the most talent or substance; assets need to get attention. Marketers in turn need to invest in promoting the great content they create for social channels. It doesn’t always stand out on its own.
4) Find your own turf, and get comfortable there first. During the Hunger Games competition, there’s a central, coveted plot of land by a structure called the Cornucopia that offers tempting rewards for participants. The problem is it’s also where most people get killed. For many marketers, Facebook is that Cornucopia. Yes, it’s important, and it has the richest user base, but marketers also need to carve out their own territory that they can own and defend.
5) The rules of the game can always be changed. Nothing is fair about the Hunger Games. Stay vigilant. Just when you think you know what you’re doing and everything’s humming, platforms can change, or people can change how they use the platforms. There’s little inertia in social media.
6) If you give people what they want, you still run the risk of irking the king. Consider the case of Seneca Crane, the lead game designer. He was the one changing the rules to make the games more entertaining. Then he broke one rule too many and paid the ultimate price for it. This often happens with social marketers, when they knowingly violate a platform’s rules in a creative move designed to get lots of press. These kinds of stunts are often shut down. Give Seneca credit though, as he died valiantly.
7) Learn how to blend in. Beyond being freakishly strong, Peeta is a talented camouflage artist. It’s a useful skill to have with social media. While brands aren’t people, marketers’ updates are often mixed in with consumers’ friends’ content. That’s a great opportunity for marketers, especially when consumers opt to receive brands’ messages that way.
8) The small, quiet ones have a shot at greatness. Consider Rue, the young, diminutive ally of Katniss, and a champion hide-and-seek player. She shows strategic brilliance and selfless courage. Similarly, many of the best uses of social media come from smaller brands that don’t have the most ardent followings. What matters is how you use your talents.
9) Don’t be content with your success. Haymitch, the advisor to Katniss and Peeta, survived the death match in a prior decade. When he first appears in the story, he’s a cantankerous, antisocial alcoholic. Aspire to greatness, and achieve it when you can, but then think about how to keep it going.
10) The odds are ever in your favor. If you’ve followed along thus far, you’ve got a pretty good handle on the rules of the Games — and when to break them. Still, not everyone’s going to win. Most mess up making avoidable errors. Fortunately, unlike for most of the Hunger Games contestants, there are plenty of second and third chances. Learn from others’ mistakes, learn from yours, and make the odds work for you.
Gin and Topics: A Blind Dog and a Phone Talking Elephant
Holy. Cow. What a week!
You know how I say I’m an introvert and all of you exclaim, “No way!”?
Well, today is very apparent I am introvert. I haven’t had more than three hours of sleep since Sunday night. I spoke yesterday morning, attended the conference, had dinner with my fellow speakers and the conference sponsors, and then I thought for sure I’d hit the wall.
Nope. Super bad jet lag. Still.
So I’m very much looking forward to being home in my own bed and getting out on my bike tomorrow. I need it.
Please let me sleep tonight. Please let me sleep tonight. Please let me sleep tonight.
I did, however, manage to find some very good videos (with some help from my friends and Mr. D) for you. Have fun!
5. Blind Dog Living in a Trash Pile. This will make you cry. But it’s sooooo worth it!
4. Website Story. This is kind of funny. It’s a parody of West Side Story. Sean McGinnis sent it to me and I chuckled. Out loud.
3. Watch the Hunger Games Reenacted by Beanie Babies. It’s no secret I LOVED the Hunger Games trilogy. And, with the movie out last weekend, Erin Feldman thought this would be something I’d like. She was right.
2. Will Ferrell announces Anchorman 2. Will Ferrell makes a surprise appearance on Conan to the sequel. If this doesn’t get you excited for a sequel, I don’t know what will. (Thanks Molli Megasko!)
1. Elephant Plays with Galaxy Note. It was 3 a.m. the other night and I was emailing Mr. D about how miserable I was. He sent me a link and said, ‘This will cheer you up.” And it did. I want one (the elephant, not the phone)!
Have a great weekend!
Angry Birds Space introduces the age of the mobile game blockbuster
By getting 10 million downloads in three days, Angry Birds Space has vaulted the mobile game business into the stratosphere of bonified entertainment blockbusters.
It’s hard to calculate how much money the game has generated because prices range from 99 cents for Angry Birds Space on iOS to $6 on Windows PCs. At $10 million at a minimum, that puts Rovio in a different league among mobile game publishers.
Still, the mobile game industry is still young and its revenues are still much smaller when viewed against the backdrop of other entertainment hits. If it were a movie’s opening weekend, the $10 million take wouldn’t be so impressive, as Hollywood’s The Hunger Games proved over the weekend with box office receipts of $155 million.
And in its first 24 hours, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 generated $400 million in its first 24 hours of sales on the PC and consoles in November.
But looked at from the sheer number of users, Rovio’s 10 million customers is impressive. The Modern Warfare 3 user count was just 6.5 million people making purchases in the first 24 hours. At around $10 each, The Hunger Games’ opening audience was perhaps 15.5 million people.
Worth noting as well: Rovio is selling a lot of non-game merchandise through partners such as Walmart. It is also selling virtual goods inside the game, with in-app purchases of 99 cents or more. There is no limit to the number of virtual goods purchases that users can make in the game.
All told, Rovio has reached far more users across the globe, with more than 700 million downloads of the whole Angry Birds series since December 2010.
“That’s a pretty significant achievement that has not happened on iOS or Android before,” said Matthaus Krzykowski at mobile search firm Xyologic and an occasional consultant for VentureBeat. “For comparison, it took a juggernaut like Pinterest more than one and a half months to get to such numbers.”
Rich Wong, a partner at Accel Partners, the venture capital firm that is a backer of Rovio, said that the spectacular Angry Birds Space launch is due to great execution and other factors, including the fact that there are far more smartphones and tablets in the market today than one or two years ago.
Rovio also leveraged third-party promoters such as T-Mobile, which created a 300-feet-long slingshot with a Red Bird on the Seattle Space Needle (pictured). It also leveraged Walmart, Samsung, and National Geographic for cross promotions and collaborated with NASA for publicity that raised the game’s visibility.
Rovio was able to debut Angry Birds Space on iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), Android, the PC, the Mac, and the Barnes & Noble Nook eBook reader on day one. It is also working on versions for other platforms such as Windows Phone 7.
Andrej Nabergoj, chief executive of App-o-day mobile discovery site Iddiction, said, “Angry Birds Space is really polished game. It’s a textbook example on how to build on existing intellectual property. If the original Angry Birds was a surprising success, nothing was left to coincidence here. Deeper game play, gorgeous graphics, innovative physics, reinterpretation of the original music. But most importantly, as extremely well-coordinated and innovative global marketing campaign involving the space station, installations, etc. Angry Birds Space repositions and re-establishes Rovio as one of the leading and most innovative mobile gaming companies.”
Tim Merel, managing director at Digi-Capital, a boutique gaming investment bank, said, “It points to the strength of the brand, and in particular the potential for Angry Birds to turn Rovio into one of the first true transmedia games companies to come out of mobile. The potential for Rovio as an entertainment platform company is very strong, and 2012 is likely to be a pivotal year for realizing that vision. Delivery on all fronts (other game types, TV, film, toys etc.) is what the company has the potential to achieve commercially, so it will be fascinating to see how” the team chooses to do so.
Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at analytics firm Flurry, said that the only thing that comes close in numbers is Draw Something, created by OMGPOP (now acquired by Zynga), which took five weeks to get to 20 million downloads.
Jeff Scott, editor of 148Apps Network, said, “It’s great that it still has such life left in it. Rovio has said that it is bringing three to four additional Angry Birds games out this year. If they continue to pull these huge numbers they may well be on their way to (their stated goal of) ‘being bigger than Disney.’”
