Insight
Cinema admissions saw a year-on-year decrease of 1.6%* despite being the most popular leisure activity amongst Malaysians. On the flip side, Warner Bros noticed that the number of movies being released was increasing by 15% year-on-year*.
Then there’s 2014’s movie lineup, packed with great action, adventure and comedy films – Malaysian’s top 3 most-loved movie genres (Source: Agency Research Data). Naturally, audiences flock to watch Transformers, Spiderman, X-Men, and Captain America, sure-fire hits.
Put together, these stats posed challenges to movie distributors:
(a) They had to fight harder to win over cinemagoers who were spoilt for choice.
(b) There was a fight for a share of their entertainment expense budget that was being spread thinly.
Against this backdrop, Warner Bros. released Annabelle in October—the month when 18 new movies were released, 5 of which were horror movies.
How could Carat connect with the audience and convince them to watch Annabelle in this extremely noisy and cluttered period?
Strategy
Carat needed to coax audiences by changing their habit of watching the usual preferred action/adventure films and instead watch Annabelle. In order to be successful, it had to rely heavily on consumer insights.
After the recent success of The Conjuring, Carat knew how ‘scary movie’ lovers would react to its prequel – Annabelle. Data collected and gathered from The Conjuring provided valuable insights that assisted in the development of the agency's hygiene targeting on age, gender, time, location, cookies and content that would yield the highest engagement rates.
Complementing the above, research shows fans of horror movie fans love the challenge of being frightened. The more frightening the movie trailer, the more they look forward to watching it.
Additionally, agency research found that 52% of audiences rely on movie trailers to influence their decision. They actively search online for scary video content as well as share them with their friends. They just love to be scared—and be the source its source, too.
So what was the strategy? Carat innovated a new way to classify horror movie audiences by inventing the FIRST-EVER filtering system for search: The GSF FUNNEL (stands for GORE-SUSCEPTIBLE-FEAR).
It channeled all the collated data into its GSF Funnel System to reach the right viewers, entice & “frighten” them, and ultimately drive them to the cinemas to watch Annabelle.
Execution
The GSF Funnel is essentially a series of smart audience filtering.
GORE audiences would be sent to the Facebook page and delisted as they would already be more than likely to watch the movie. They are automatic fans.
Audiences in SUSCEPTIBLE and FEAR were trafficked against drop-offs. Audiences who went further along the funnel but failed the ‘Gore’ criteria was placed in the ‘Susceptible’ cluster, whilst ‘Fear’ indicated the lowest level of interest.
Audiences in the ‘Susceptible’ list were re-engaged and re-listed into the funnel. Targeting in this space was mapped against the best day/time engagement opportunities to ensure that a major part of this group would be re-purposed to ‘Gore’. Ads were not visible during any other time. Frequency was another important element to how targeting was managed as it needed to subtly guide the “Susceptible”.
The ‘Fear’ audiences required a different approach. While they have shown interest for Annabelle, they were not responsive to the funnel. Insights revealed that a majority of them were Female. The agency targeted them with Banners in the evening and video ads at night. Traffic was sent to Facebook to gauge if there was traction on the comments section. Visibility here was kept light to re-evaluate the clustering again.
The night of launch, video Ads were ‘sprayed’ to “Susceptible” and “Fear” audiences as the final hook to make them consider Annabelle.
All search queries from social content and digital placements were directed to the GSF Funnel and the right ads were served.
Results
With the GSF Funnel, Annabelle became Malaysia’s highest grossing horror movie of all time. At the end of its theatrical run, Annabelle earned $5.3m – that’s $1m more than the next biggest film in its genre, The Conjuring ($3.7m).
The Annabelle story page received over 550,000 unique views, surpassing expectations. As an added bonus, close to 5,000 people shared the story online, generating more buzz.
Google Trends revealed that Annabelle was the number one searched for movie in 2014. Annabelle related keyword searches experienced growth greater than 5,000% over the campaign period with high search volumes at 756,360 by December—it was still being searched two months after it opened.
This led to Annabelle setting the record for the highest weekend opening for horror films in Malaysia with $2.44m - 8X higher than expectations.
Furthermore, Annabelle needed only two weeks (instead of expected six weeks) to nearly double its box office receipts to $4.31m.
That’s a lot of scared—and happy—Malaysians!