What happened when Sony Pictures pitted creator content against traditional creative
Winning The Drum Awards for Social in the Entertainment category is MG OMD and Sony Pictures with a campaign for the blockbuster film Napoleon.
Sony Pictures were the first studio in the UK to use a creator/traditional creative multi-cell BLS on.
The campaign ended up being a huge success, with a 8.8% in lift in awareness and a 6% lift in intent across TikTok. Meta drove a 34 point lift in ad recall (236% higher than the Entertainment benchmark), 15.6 awareness and a 9.2 point lift in intent.
The LiveRamp study concluded a 15% incremental lift in box office sales via ticket bookings, largely driven by a 9.3% increase in average spend per customer – showcasing TikTok users were more likely to buy premium seats or go at peak times.
Overall, this campaign was a media first and was able to provide additional value and insight to Sony Pictures for all their future campaigns.
‘The team at MGOMD are always looking to evolve our approach to social media investment ensuring we are driving the most value from the creative and different opportunities with each partner. The campaign for Napoleon allowed us to exploit beta testing new products while combining new measurement opportunities with key media partners, which not only provided excellent campaign results, but also learnings that we are able to take forward into our other campaigns. MGOMD have given us a benchmark for success to measure our campaigns against moving forward," Joshua Heaton-Armstrong, head of digital at Sony Pictures Releasing UK
This social campaign for Sony's Napoleon movie outperformed all expectations
Napoleon was the Tentpole release at the end of 2023, directed by Ridley Scott, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby. Our approach to the social campaign was to drive high impact at scale. We focused on Meta and TikTok for this campaign, utilising Meta’s Target Frequency Beta, and a Multi-cell BLS on TikTok to measure the effectiveness of creator content vs more traditional creative. This was a studio first in the UK, becoming the first to include a Creative Breakout for Sales Lift, as well as including a Movio Study alongside this, allowing us to attribute ticket sales back to different types of creatives, from awareness through to intent.