| Title | BRINGING 'SALT' MOVIE TO LIFE |
| Brand | SONY PICTURES JAPAN |
| Product / Service | "SALT" MOVIE RELEASE |
| Category | A08. Best Use of Social Media Marketing |
| Entrant | UM Tokyo, JAPAN |
| Entrant Company: | UM Tokyo, JAPAN |
| Media Agency: | UM Tokyo, JAPAN |
| Name | Company | Position |
|---|---|---|
| Jeremy Paul | Universal McCann | Planning Director |
| Masato Sasaki | Universal McCann | Planning Group Head |
Demand for the app made it an overnight blockbuster: hosted on Mixi, the app was used by 5.28m people, about 40% of all those who visited the main Salt movie site. Over half of these were delivered before paid-for media broke so the take-up can only have been caused by word of mouth. We have also excluded any numbers achieved after the movie premier in Tokyo. The app cost under US$700k yet achieved an RoI of 3.58, ticket sales equivalent to 10% of Salt’s total box office take…and almost all was delivered ahead of the opening weekend.
We worked with Japan’s biggest social media site, Mixi, to create a ‘first’: an app which would cut through the anonymity in Japanese social media sites to show all the hidden connections you have to other people on that site – people who have looked at your profile, friends of friends etc. Mixi usually uses these ‘connections’ to make friend recommendations but keeps them ‘hidden’; we allowed people to see these hidden connections for the first time. Just like Jolie’s character in Salt movie uncovers hidden connections within CIA conspiracy, users of the app would be uncovering hidden connections in their social media. The app did not receive paid media support; we seeded it to movie bloggers within Mixi and created links to the app from Salt movie’s official website; after that all the support was from earned media as people buzzed about it.
Our challenge was to cut through competitor noise to drive interest ahead of ‘Salt’ movie’s opening weekend; we’d have the usual movie trailers but to stand out we needed something special. Our target 20 and 30-something Japanese use social media for peer movie reviews so we looked for a unique hook from within our movie which we could bring to life in these channels: the plot of ‘Salt’ revolves around conspiracy, deception and deceit within the CIA and no one is who they appear to be. Our insight was that because Japanese think ‘bragging’ is rude it is normal that their social media sites are anonymous – images replace profile pic’s and pseudonyms are used – so in Japanese social media, just like Angelina Jolie’s movie character, you never really know who people are; so to highlight this would be deeply culturally interesting and link to the movie.