Disney and Pixar succeeded in its social media campaign to promote Toy Story 3. Releasing viral videos including fake, vintage-style ads featuring the new characters sparked interest in children as well as parents, who could "reminisce about their own childhood toys; a sentiment entirely in line with the Toy Story brand," explains Mashable blogger, Zachary Sniderman in his article, "5 Winning Social Media Campaigns to Learn From." They also ran an iAd on the iPhone 4 and created a Facebook page complete with a built-in ticket-buying app. This app gave ticket buyers the option to share with friends that they had purchased tickets, promoting the campaign's idea that "no friend gets left behind," which is a play on the movie's tagline, "No Toy Gets Left Behind."
This campaign was successful due to its involvement of both children and their parents. It created excitement for both groups, and something for the two to share with each other. In addition, the brand was maintained throughout the campaign by basing the entire idea around the movie's tagline.
A not-so-successful social media campaign that comes to mind is the Celebrity "Digital Death" campaign put on by Alicia Keys to raise money for her charity. She gathered a group of celebs including Usher, Lady Gaga, Ryan Seacrest, Kim Kardashian, Justin Timberlake and more to go quiet or "die" on Twitter and Facebook, until $1 million was raised. Photos were posted of the celebs in caskets to promote the campaign. While Keys saw some results, the campaign was moving a lot slower than she had expected. The campaign was saved when a billionaire donated $500,000 to the cause. One article said of the campaign, ""It's the worst mismanagement of star power I've ever seen in my life." The motivation just wasn't strong enough. Having the stars online or not is not THAT big of a deal to people, thus the campaign didn't get as much recognition and word-of-mouth promotion as Keys wanted.
Disney and Pixar typically get things right. I feel like they know what their consumers want and always use the proper marketing campaigns to reach their target audiences. Using the IPhone and app features was a great way to get people to buy their tickets. It allowed people to avoid lines and sold out shows and walk straight into the theater with as little interruption as possible.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree that Disney knows what they're doing when it comes to marketing. All of the Toy Story movies have been a huge success, especially how it allowed parents to connect with their children.
ReplyDeleteI think Disney's new marketing campaign for visiting Disney World has been a success so far. They are basing their ad campaign off of real families' home movies from trips to Disney or surprising their kids with the news of the trip. This has set in well with consumers so far. I think it will do the company good to connect with its consumers and allow them to be apart of the magic as well.