A recent New York Times article details the sophisticated marketing campaign that went into promoting the film, The Hunger Games. It opens with a statement that, as students of E-Marketing, should come as no surprise to us.
Selling a movie used to be a snap. You printed a poster, ran trailers in theaters and carpet-bombed NBC’s Thursday night lineup with ads. Today, that kind of campaign would get a movie marketer fired.This statement provides the foundation for an explanation of the Hunger Games' creative and elaborate E-Marketing campaign. In addition to the standard production of posters, trailers and TV spots bought to promote The Hunger Games, an expertly orchestrated E-Marketing campaign had been set in motion many months before any other promotional material had been released. It started with the release of the logo to movie blogs, meant to tease and promote preliminary discussion. From there, over the course of months a multitude of creative E-Marketing stunts were executed. One such example was a Twitter scavenger hunt where100 puzzle pieces were distributed among 100 different websites who were told to post their piece on their twitter account. The idea being that fans could hop along the twitter-sphere collecting them in order to form the full image, A new poster for the film. Another example would be their invitation of 5 fans (instead of reporters) to the set of the Hunger Games, who would then create an online buzz. In addition to these two examples, a network of alternate reality websites, facebook and Iphone games, and user generated Hunger Games Youtube videos have all been created or prompted by this campaign.
This campaign reflects what we have learned thus far in class. The invitation of fans instead of reporters reflects the idea that the words of peers outweighs the words of standard marketing correspondence. Prompting bloggers to foster participation in their scavenger hunt, as well as prompting users to create their own youtube videos also reflects this notion. This E-marketing campaign also made sure it was offering value through their Facebook/Iphone games.
It is worth noting that despite how extensive the E-marketing portion of their marketing campaign was, the marketing budget for the film in total was around 45 million dollars, which is apparently quite small for a major release.
Despite its modest marketing budget, it seems the film has been able to do very well for itself. A more recent New York Times article states that it took in 155 million dollars in North America in its opening weekend. This figure broke records for a spring release; something that perhaps could not have been accomplished without an expertly crafted online marketing strategy.
