Today, my Facebook feed is awash in cryptic posts.
Someone named Douglass is either nowhere to be found, or in trouble with the
FBI, or has had his name adopted by a number of my friends.
Just to reassure you, if you know someone named
Douglass, he is fine. In fact, this particular guy doesn't even exist. Douglass
is the title character in a movie entitled I Am Douglass. It is in the
development phase, which means we are trying to come up with the means to make
it. Those means include money, actors, and distribution.
As it turns out, a career full of creating
commercials, advertising, and sports television in Texas doesn't necessarily
introduce one to the types of folks who make films happen. As a matter of fact,
those sorts of folks tend to be rather skittish about fresh faces. They may
well be friendly people, but the world contains a lot more movie ideas than it
does commercially viable movie ideas, and that makes such persons
understandably reluctant to devote valuable time or resources to an initiative
without a track record.
Of course, that doesn't stop my partners and me
from wanting to make the movie. It does mean we would need to think creatively
to try to make the right connections. We would need a BtoB marketing plan.
Our initial efforts involved networking, as any
BtoB plan does. We gained a lot of knowledge, but hadn't been able to network
our way to the types of connections we needed. So we decided to focus on the
movie's brand. We saw four elements as vital to influencing our target audience
: script quality, social media viability, topicality, and our businesslike
outlook. If we could demonstrate mastery of those factors, we felt influencers
would see our project as either capable of commercial success or worthy of
becoming a passion project for them (hopefully both).
Our rollout strategy consisted mostly of social
media. Social's capital costs of zero fit our low budget (although the plan
includes some limited expenditures to push a handful of posts). But it fit our
goals, too. The film's plot involves two men attempting to flee to a place
where they can safely reveal explosive information about government
surveillance overreach. The topic of surveillance certainly gets plenty of
viral play worldwide, so our hope was to latch onto some of that. Both the
issue and the internet transcend national boundaries, enlarging our potential
audience. If you're trying to show an audience exists for an entertainment
product, showing an actual large audience helps make your point.
So a social strategy could help us demonstrate
topicality and social media viability (the plot contains social media elements,
so that will be an important element of the final marketing mix once we have
made the film). The quick-hitting nature of social posts also served our goal
of demonstrating our script had quality content. We could post individual lines
and plot elements to show its depth and entertaining qualities without spoiling
the story.
We felt like the simple act of having a marketing
plan at this stage of development would help establish some business
credibility. We could also give people the opportunity to review our
credentials. Those don't include blockbuster feature films, but they do include
quality shorts and work for noteworthy entities like Major League Baseball
teams.
We took some other steps to help ourselves look
business-minded. We used trade inventory in a local weekly newspaper to promote
our website (which we made to appear as if a fan of the title character had
created). We created an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign targeted at
pre-production, figuring we would both monetize any social buzz we created and
show investors we were committed to raising money any way we could. We also started
a Zazzle store selling a number of I Am Douglass items. We created videos
promoting the crowdfunding initiative. We hope some of them are funny. While
funds generated by crowdfunding and the store will be beneficial, those
outlets, like the Twitters and Google+s, are more about providing additional
ways for interested parties to interact with the brand.
We'll populate our various social media sites with
content about the movie and the issue. Eventually, we hope to see the
#iamdouglass hashtag show up in surveillance discussions. Once we get some
critical mass of attention, we'll try to merchandise it into earned media.
Media outlets that cover or comment on the surveillance issue might find our
effort newsworthy.
It all adds up to a formula we hope will entice
actors or investors to make inquiries about our project. They may feel strongly
about the surveillance issue and believe this provides a way to stoke further
discussion about it. A number of actors, like John Cusack and Janine Turner,
have expressed their opinions publicly. Others, like Penn Jillette or Drew
Carey, espouse worldviews that question governmental intrusiveness. We even
speculate that tech companies who have lost overseas business due to NSA
policies might consider backing the project as a content marketing play.
We also hope we'll have established the proposition
as a commercially viable one. The concept has appeal for several niche
audiences, and the broader issue seems unlikely to disappear soon. If
successful, our marketing campaign will demonstrate that the film has staying
power, too.
Those cryptic posts referenced in the opening
paragraph? They're how we launched the social campaign. We asked friends and
friends of friends to post these cryptic messages with our hashtag #iamdouglass.
We confused more than a few folks, and hopefully will have created interest for
when we reveal tomorrow what it was all about. We took the same approach with our website, creating a fake front page that makes you wonder, just for a minute at least, what the heck is going on. Our pitch video, too, tended toward the conspiratorial.
Will our campaign work? We start finding out
tomorrow.
Rush Olson has spent two decades making movie-like
creative products for companies, sports teams, broadcasters. He currently
creates ad campaigns and related creative projects through his company, Rush
Olson Creative & Sports.
RushOlson.com
Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports
Facebook.com/RushOlsonCreativeandSports
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