Why is the movie marketing of short videos becoming more and more crazy?

Movie marketing through short videos is becoming more and more crazy. This method not only allows users to understand the content of the movie more intuitively, but also increases the popularity and influence of the movie in a short period of time. This article discusses the relevant content and I hope it will be helpful to you.

"The director secretly sat in a corner, constantly turning his head to look at the audience, carefully observing everyone's reactions, with his hands clenched tightly in nervousness. Only when he saw the audience laughing continuously did he feel relieved and smiled."

"The girl frowned while watching the movie, frequently checked her phone, and suddenly stood up and sat aside to start working. It turns out that in the adult world, watching a full movie is a luxury."

“After the movie ended, the theater turned into a hip-hop dance scene. It turns out the hidden Easter egg of the movie is the audience. It’s not the youth who are enthusiastic, but us!”

These marketing techniques that seem unnatural and enough to make viewers frown seem to have become the mainstream of short video platform movie promotion. The film producers are constantly competing with each other in marketing methods, and even strange scenes such as "special blind audience" and "dogs crying" have appeared.

Image source: Screenshot from TikTok

The special medium of short videos is the direct reason why marketers are becoming more and more "competitive". A practitioner said helplessly that if you want to stand out in the ocean of information flow, sometimes you have to use some special means.

The reason why movie marketing has to survive and die in short videos is that short videos are becoming the most important promotional channel. Industry insiders told Hedgehog Commune that currently about 30% of the marketing budget of mainstream theater movies will be invested in Douyin, which is also the largest part of the entire delivery system.

Of course, short videos have also given filmmakers enough returns. Just this summer, from "Gone Girl" to "All or Nothing", the box office revenue of 3 billion yuan is almost inseparable from the "trend" successfully created by the filmmakers on the short video platform.

Even so, the short video marketing methods of different film companies vary in quality, and the marketing effects also vary greatly. Whether marketing is useful or not sometimes lies beyond marketing alone.

1. Movie promotion, group activities on short videos

Short videos boosting movie marketing is not a new topic. Some practitioners recall that "Ex-Files 3" many years ago was the first successful case. As short video platforms are becoming more and more "national apps", the number of short video users in China has exceeded 1 billion, and film producers are investing more and more in short video platforms.

Both the film producers and the marketing planners are happy to copy successful marketing cases. When Ex-Files 3 successfully won nearly 2 billion box office with its reaction crying marketing, many similar scenes began to appear on short video platforms. It is not uncommon for girls to cry while watching a movie in wedding dresses and couples who broke up could not hide their sadness while watching the last movie.

Image source: Screenshot from TikTok

Even crying marketing can be applied to dogs. The Russian niche movie "Parma: A Dog's Story" was the first to set an example when it was released in China. After that, the Chinese remake "Hachiko: A Dog's Story" was released. It was not uncommon to see dogs watching the movie in groups with tears in their eyes.

Today, judging from the audience's experience, there are more and more ways to market short video movies.

If the audience wants to laugh, the film company will arrange relevant staff to sit in conspicuous positions and laugh uncontrollably. The level of their craziness may be beyond that of even Stephen Chow. The purpose is to tell the audience as much as possible that our movie is very funny.

The audience wanted "feelings", so the film company tried its best to add value to the film. As soon as the film ended, a dance troupe began to dance in unison in front of the screen, letting the audience know that "it's not the youth that is passionate, it's us." According to a practitioner close to the marketing team of "Passion", the film company invited local dance troupes from all over the country to be present at the scene, some of which were charged, while others were free.

As for the "creators' painstaking efforts" marketing that the film producers have long formed a routine, it also has a new display on the short video channel, such as "the director looks back at the audience's response." In that video with millions of likes, the part of the video copy that reflects the director's painstaking creation is clearly marked as yellow.

Image source: Screenshot from TikTok

The author personally experienced a live post-screening marketing. In just 20 minutes, the relevant personnel invited by the film company took turns to sing, give gifts, and tell jokes. The post-screening performance was probably much funnier than the comedy movie itself, which was not funny.

An unavoidable underlying logic is that compared to other entertainment products or consumer goods, movies are largely a "one-shot deal" in a short period of time. Long before short videos became the mainstream of marketing, similar "fraudulent marketing" situations appeared. Coupled with the pursuit of "speed" by short videos as a medium, movie marketing in short videos inevitably tends to be exaggerated and spectacular.

Regardless of the word-of-mouth and public opinion after the movie, whoever can stand out and attract the audience's attention, whoever can "seduce" the audience into the cinema, has already succeeded.

In fact, the above-mentioned movies with fancy marketing behaviors did not produce bad results because of the marketing. Although some viewers left comments in the comment section saying "I don't want to watch it after seeing this marketing" because of the excessive behavior of the film company, the millions of likes still prove the success of the promotion.

2. Movie Marketing Ranking List: Who is Bronze and Who is King?

Although it has been criticized by many viewers, the results show that the marketing of "whole-life" is not weak. "Tea" has earned 369 million yuan in box office so far, which is quite difficult for an animated film with a theme that is not particularly popular, under the pressure of many blockbusters.

As for "A Long Time Ago", which has special blind audiences, and "Hot Heat", in which the actors competed to dance after the movie, they earned 1.769 billion and 880 million yuan in box office respectively, and both are top players with high box office rankings in the summer season.

But if we rank the short video marketing of movies, the above can only be regarded as the gold level, which is qualified but not outstanding. From the gold level, there are bronze levels where money may not be used, and king levels where small amounts of money can achieve big results.

The bronze rank is a translation of the traditional short video marketing method, which is to launch a number of vertical movie self-media accounts, allowing big Vs to affirm the wonderfulness of the movie through a third party method to attract users' attention.

The reason for doing this is that the fan portraits of vertical movie self-media are relatively accurate, and they are often people who are interested in movies. In theory, it is easier to bring about conversions by targeting big Vs with precise user bases, and can achieve a more positive publicity effect.

But the downside is that this requires a lot of quality for the film as a whole. Compared to the possibility that one bright spot can influence the overall situation, audiences who place orders based on their trust in big Vs often have minimum requirements for the quality of the film. Blindly accepting orders for films of poor quality will consume the trust of users. This also makes big Vs with long-term business plans cautious when facing such placements.

"Flip" ads happen all the time

A top copy editor once told Hedgehog Commune that he had received an offer to invest in a movie for the cinema, but rejected it because "the movie was too bad and there was nothing to praise about it." This means that when the quality of a movie is poor, it may be useless to invest in it, or even impossible to invest in it.

However, short video influencers are still one of the necessary marketing methods for cinema films. At present, the integration of Douyin’s local life and short video content also allows film producers to more clearly see the effect of influencers in bringing in tickets, which may provide more quantifiable technical means for the industry to move towards refinement.

As for the real king-level marketing, it is actually the kind of marketing that achieves great results with little money and uses the point to lead the whole. The best example in this summer season is "All or Nothing", which broke 500 million at the box office of the preview, and now has exceeded 3 billion, and is predicted to have reached 3.846 billion.

Compared with the above two methods, the marketing of "All or Nothing" is not "weird". The film company did not do large-scale "reaction marketing". In the early stage of the film promotion, it only released some regular promotional materials, etc., but in the end, the entire Douyin formed a popular moment in which everyone was imitating Wang Chuanjun's "waving hands to worship Buddha".

Image source: Screenshot from TikTok

A film industry analyst told Hedgehog Commune that the level of this marketing planning was obviously very smart, the release of materials was carefully designed, Wang Chuanjun's actions were very easy to learn, and a batch of small paid placements eventually led to large-scale free imitations, creating the Douyin moment of "All or Nothing".

At the same time, he also said that the success of "All or Nothing" was also related to the "Ga Yaozi" rumor that has been popular on the Chinese Internet for a long time. Urban anecdotes laid the foundation for the popularity, and short videos became an amplifier of the popularity.

According to the data from Lighthouse Professional Edition, since its release, All or Nothing has topped the "TikTok Movie Chart" for four consecutive weeks. There is no doubt that TikTok is the biggest contributor to All or Nothing on its way to becoming the champion of this summer's movie season.

3. The battle for attention

Movie marketing does not necessarily have to be entirely related to the content of the movie itself. This may be the biggest revelation that the short video promotion of this summer season has brought to the film producers or related planners.

For example, after experiencing a period of sluggish box office, the movie "The First Part of the Investiture of the Gods" began to cater to user preferences and played with the "business language" jokes. When the new top-tier Douyin accounts "A Smile That Conquers the City" and "The Scholar" became popular, the characters in the film were given relevant scenes and incorporated into them.

Image source: Screenshot from TikTok

This promotional method does not seem to directly introduce the content of the movie, and it does not seem to make the audience want to watch it. But the logic behind it is that in the vast amount of information in short videos, a single video trigger cannot drive sales. Only repeated exposure can bring more conversions.

However, such non-movie entertainment content can label users as interested. After stopping at the first video, they may continue to browse related movie materials and promote transactions. This means that for the film company, any content that can bring attention to the movie is effective. When they are combined, they will form a content system to provide the audience with all the information they need.

On platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou, there are also live streaming rooms and short video content to supplement the sales. When the box office of "The Legend of the Gods Part 1" was not good, many fans spontaneously gave advice to director Wuershan and his team, "Go to xxx's live streaming room, they have a lot of traffic."

The competition for attention is not only happening within short video platforms, but also between different media, different companies and even different forms of entertainment.

An industry insider told Hedgehog Community that the ratio of a film's marketing budget to production costs is basically fixed, and the budget will not increase due to the investment in new short video channels. This means that the budget that the film company originally wanted to spend on traditional Internet platforms such as Weibo has been snatched away by emerging Internet platforms such as Douyin.

At the same time, he also revealed that at the table of film promotion, only Douyin is standing. Because many film producers have signed relevant agreements with Douyin, if they are found to cooperate with other platforms, they may be restricted. Since Douyin itself has a huge traffic pool and can also bring considerable returns to film producers, many film producers have accepted this request.

"Different times create different heroes." A marketing practitioner lamented, "When my parents were watching movies, it was enough to put up a poster at the entrance of the cinema. This was the biggest publicity. Then there were articles on WeChat public accounts and hot searches on Weibo. Then, everyone focused on short videos. The film producers also gave the biggest piece of the pie to Douyin."

Going deeper, movies are just a form of entertainment.

Users can not only replace one movie with another, but can even replace all movies with another form of entertainment. As Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said, "Our entertainment industry does not have a fixed market where we can sell things every year." People can easily find any other form of entertainment to replace games, just as they can find other forms of entertainment to replace movies.

In this case, the existence of film marketing is not only a necessary means, but also reflects the "anxiety" of the film producers. This anxiety is like "other people's children go to cram school, do you want your children to go to cram school?" When many forms of entertainment coexist in the vast and numerous information universe, the anxiety of competing for consumers' attention will keep coming, like a whip constantly whipping a spinning top.

"If it (movie marketing) doesn't come up with something magical, how can it beat these new things?"

Author: Chen Shoucheng, Editor: Chen Meixi

Source: WeChat public account "Hedgehog Commune"