20th Century Fox team up with Channel 4 to boost films

The Big Idea

The formula of success for film marketing was changing in an increasingly digital landscape. While TV airtime 2 weeks out was still a key way to get scale, in a social media driven world where news spreads fast, standing out and getting the film talked about was increasingly important. Talkability couldn’t be bought though, it needed to be earned by behaving differently.

The Fox and Vizeum partnership had been a leading one for years, but with continuous change they had to stay fresh and take more risks than ever to deliver strategic vision – for 20th Century Fox to be the first in class film distributor in a rapidly changing world. Channel 4 with our born risky attitude was the perfect partner, the challenge was that at the start of 2012 Vizeum & C4 hadn’t delivered any standout TV led projects for Fox. At the heart of the problem was the briefing process for film launch ideas was based on short turnaround times, with little information, but always with the words “media first”. Something needed to change….

Making it Happen

It was simple, rather than wait for the brief, we wrote our own. We entered a new phase of on-going dialogue with Vizeum and Fox, going from a reactive to a proactive approach, to create some truly stand out TV campaigns that would integrate earned media and talent like never before.

This began with C4 immersing ourselves in Fox’s business and gaining real insight in what they did and didn’t need from us. The by-product of this was that Vizeum/ Fox had almost created an extended planning team at C4, and a much more efficient process.

Who knew talking was more effective than selling! The process started out as formal quarterly meetings but soon shifted to weekly (and sometimes daily) conversations, working on projects nine months out. The most interesting element was that C4 involved commissioners and their insight team, while Fox were bringing in their social and PR teams into meetings. This collaborative approach was all about unlocking value beyond just TV media. We opened up the idea generation process, with C4, Vizeum and Fox working as a combined team and sourcing ideas from across the business, including crowd-sourcing ideas using the C4 Tribes youth panel. This resulted in an idea for Starred Up that saw prisoners bake cakes for film journalists. We also harnessed the word of mouth power of the E4 Slackers club, letting students preview films for free to ensure releases like Fault in our Stars had our audiences talking about them pre-release.

The Results

Of the 15 projects we delivered, 6 of the titles opened at no.1 in the UK. This different way of working delivered award winning innovation, winning 5 awards including a Media Week Gold for Innovation and a Thinkbox award for best use of TV Innovation. In 2012 for Prometheus we created the first ever live TV tweet integration and for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes we invited the audience to vote which exclusive clip they would like to see next live via Twitter.

This proactive, longer term approach is seeing TV used much further out from release and also allowing for greater talent integration. For Wolverine, Dynamo the magician created the first ever live illusion in ad break from the red carpet and for Cara Delevingne film, Paper Towns, the Made in Chelsea cast are being flown to the Fox studio in LA to see an exclusive premiere and this will be integrated into the show. These projects have created stand out and talkability that have helped drive box office sales. In 2014, Fox had the biggest box office of any single UK film distributor in the 100 year history of UK cinema. Impressive in a declining category and with a diverse slate of releases rather than one megamovie.