Fantastic Four takes to Instagram in Asia

Client: 20^th Century Fox

Agency: We Are Social

Market: Asia-Pacific: Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philliphines, Singapore, Thailand

Campaign scope: Social media

Background:

According to the agency, the ‘Power of Four’ campaign centres around a character-driven, Instagram-led content strategy. The aim is to tell the story of each main character, their powers, and their role in the Fantastic Four team.  

As such, We Are Social created an Instagram profile for each member of the Fantastic Four. Each character’s Instagram accounts feature a horizontal timeline that allows fans to scroll through in order to learn more about the selected character. The timeline will highlight events through each character's life using short videos, shared over a 2-week period ahead of the film’s launch from 5 August 2015 onwards.

The activity involves a contest, centred around locating the ‘Power of 4’. In order to get involved, users must work in teams of four friends to identify a hidden visual within each character’s Instagram feed that will make up a single, combined image. Once every hidden image is identified, users are prompted to take a photo of all the images together, tagged with #Powerof4 followed by a market-specific abbreviation, in order to be in with a chance of winning tickets to the film’s special screening.

The character's accounts:

Reed Richards: https://instagram.com/reedrichards.ff

Ben Grimm: https://instagram.com/bengrimm.ff

Johnny Storm: https://instagram.com/johnnystorm.ff

Sue Storm: https://instagram.com/suestorm.ff

Press release quote:

Julie Glenn, associate director of marketing, 20th Century Fox, Asia-Pacific:

We wanted to introduce the Fantastic Four to a whole new audience and showcase them as relatable young characters who use their new powers to work together and save Earth. Telling their story on social seemed like a great way for people to engage with our characters and position Fantastic Four as the event superhero movie of the year.

Campaign Asia Pacific's comments: There’s a big trend in using Instagram account pages as a larger canvas for images. It’s a nice idea, that when done well, gives you the sensation of piecing a puzzle together. Enticing your curiosity, it makes you wonder “what image will come next?” Recently GoPro released a new product on Instagram in this way, teasing its fans and doing a good job of it.

The strategy however, only works well when it seems genuine and when an account already has engagement. The work in this case feels rather tactical and short-term. Going onto the Instagram page of each Fantastic Four character, which at the time of this writing only had about eight followers respectively, the whole thing feels like an advert (or worse still, a spam page). It seems more “push” than “pull” because the film’s characters are just placeholder images for the film’s promotion on Instagram. The question that should be asked is, is this the right solution for Instagram?