Thinslicing The Hunger Games

Plenty has been written about the significant role played by a carefully organised and orchestrated social campaign for The Hunger Games. So I’ll simply jump to my ‘thinslice,’ namely how the movie marketers used fan response to tweak as they went along. First of all though consider that this process is much like gaming company wooga carefully monitors user response to tweak aspects of its online games to help boost engagement and thus ROI.

Secondly, to get back to The Hunger Games, and to illustrate what this means – the value of feedback from fans – to be able to optimise your campaign here’s a key quote from Lionsgate’s senior vice president for digital marketing Danielle DePalma:

“What seemed to work the best, too, was fan-created content. I mean, the Peeta memes were always the top performers. That’s how we were really learning about what our audience liked most, through those Facebook results.” This character-focused social media strategy is also backed up by Crimson Hexagon’s analysis of the factors impacting on the success of Julian Fellowes, creator of the popular period drama ‘Downton Abbey’, with the US version, ‘The Gilded Age’ soon to be launched:

“Our analysis indicates that in order for Fellowes to recreate “Downton Abbey” with “The Gilded Age,” he must develop compelling, witty characters with strong moral convictions.”

In other words (ref: my previous post on the value of thinslicing), joining together how your audience behaves (qualitative) with what the data tells you (quantitative), gives you the intelligence to optimise your campaign as you go along – providing you possess the level of organisation and flexibility to allow that to happen (context) effectively. That’s what we’ve been doing at Sony EU in Q3 to good effect too, on the back of the colossal success of ‘Skyfall’.

What this means is that social media marketeers have to think and act on fan data much more like online gaming companies if they are going to both engage their customer base, and deliver real returns.

 

What video games are good for your children?

Neat infographic from ‘Frugal Dad‘ on how to moderate your children’s use of video games. And adding to the intriguing list of education games, there’s the plus-billion correct answer maths free gaming site sumdog.com to have a go at in between shoot-up style gaming too:-)

“My kids can’t seem to get enough of their video games. I can take away the Xbox 360’s power cord or tell the kids to go outside and play, but at the end of the day, they simply want to keep on playing. Fortunately, more and more research is coming out that distinguishes healthy, responsible gaming from the excessive, zoned out variety.

“Our latest infographic goes over some really great things video games are responsible for. It’s pretty surprising to find that genre to genre, games can do some remarkable things for your brain and body. While I’m not thrilled to find my kids three hours in to a Halo session, I’m certainly relieved to learn that some real good can come out of their gaming.

“The other useful thing I took away is that moderation is crucial to healthy gaming. It makes sense. Video games have very real benefits but too much of the same thing, day in, day out, actually ends up hurting you. As a dad, it’s a relief to hear that if I have to, I can still yank the plug and point to the door. Check out the inforgraphic and see what good gaming can do for you.”

Gaming is good for you

Source: Frugal Dad