Marketing movies on Facebook
Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ:
ClickZ looks at how Indiana Jones has been promoted on Facebook:
Paramount Pictures is expected to have a monster hit this Memorial
Day Weekend with “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”
Regardless of how the film does in theaters, the studio has scored big
on Facebook.
Not with the movie, necessarily, but with a virtual Fedora.
Starting Wednesday morning, Paramount offered Facebook users a chance
to send their friends a small digital version of Indy’s iconic brown
hat as a “virtual gift.” While some gifts require a $1 fee, the Fedora
was offered as a free sponsored gift from the studio.
The Fedoras became available at 4:30am on Wednesday morning,
the day before the movie hit theaters. By 3pm, all 250,000 had sold
out.
Matt Hicks, a spokesman with Facebook, said that the company
couldn’t confirm whether it was the fastest a virtual gift had gone,
but said it was “definitely among the fastest we’ve ever seen,”
especially considering that “people weren’t really awake for the first
few hours it was available.”
Hicks said it was standard practice for advertisers to set an inventory limit on virtual gifts in order to drive demand.
The Fedora was only one part of a larger marketing campaign on
the social network, however. Each gift provided a link to the movie’s
Facebook page, where fans could find local showings, read other users’
reviews, post messages, download widgets and other applications, and
view stills from the film’s production.
The page also included a space for users to upload videos and
photos of their own, including an instructional video on “How to Crack
a Whip Like Indy” and the infamous Annie Leibovitz Vanity Fair photos
of Miley Cryus with a brown Fedora superimposed on her head.
Paramount also ran…