CASE STUDY: Interaction captures social users in Spider-man's web

Background and aim

Sony Pictures engaged Universal McCann and VML Qais to help launch The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in Singapore in May. The studio targeted moviegoers from age 16 to 45 in the month before the film's opening.

Execution

The agencies hired Sizmek Social to run a two-phase social campaign using its Socialfire offering, which enables placement of rich-media ads in social feeds. The technology supports responsive ads, which work across mobile, tablet and desktop devices.

For the first phase of the campaign, promoted posts on Facebook incorporated a mobile mini-game (three mini-games for desktop users), presented a teaser trailer and directed people to enter a photo contest. The contest involved adding the movie hero to personal photos and uploading those pictures to Instagram.

During the second phase, the Facebook posts continued to promote the trailer but also drove traffic to ticket-booking sites by displaying an interactive map of theaters in central Singapore.

Results

During phase one, the campaign generated a clickthrough rate of 16.75 per cent and an interaction rate of 219 per cent. The latter metric is the total number of interactions (clicks anywhere on the ad) divided by the total number of users who clicked to expand the rich media from the Facebook newsfeed. Sizmek quotes a baseline of 154 per cent for the interaction rate in other campaigns.

In the second phase, the CTR was 16.61 per cent and the interaction rate of 262 per cent.

Overall, the campaign generated a total CTR of 16.7 per cent, an interaction rate of 240 per cent, and a video fully played rate of 13 per cent. 

The film took in nearly US$4 million in its opening week in Singapore and is currently the country's third highest-grossing film for the year, with just under $8 million, according to the Internet Movie Database's Box Office Mojo website.