Distributors, Sales Agents, Aggregators: there is hope in the time of Corona.
The Opportunity
The opportunity in Video on Demand (VOD) has never been stronger. In this article, we will show you that there is some good news for the entire industry coming out of the Corona Crisis, including the opportunity for you to find a new audience for recent releases and catalogue titles. Your audiences are at home, they are bored and they love movies. Get your audience data strategy aligned and go and meet them today.
In our recent article “It’s all home entertainment now!" we highlighted the opportunities and challenges offered by Video On Demand, as film distributors prepare for tough times ahead with cinemas set to remain closed for the foreseeable future. Recent campaigns for various VOD launches confirmed our belief that it is extremely difficult to track sales and tag audiences for retargeting when it comes to major VOD platforms such as Amazon, iTunes or Google Play.
For a TVOD release to succeed you need an audience data strategy. If you do not already collect data on your audiences it is not too late to start. In this case study, we will demonstrate how powerful a data strategy can be by utilizing interest-based data (arthouse film fans) combined with custom (our collected audiences from the theatrical campaign) and lookalikes audiences. 80% of the interaction and traffic came from this unique audience data collected by Gruvi and is the reason why the campaign was such a success.
For further information about the study CONTACT US
The Case Study
We worked on promoting a slate of VOD releases including Parasite, Pain & Glory, Midsommar, Loro and Everybody Knows. We focused on Facebook carousel ads in order to launch the campaign as quickly as possible and to maximise the modest budget. A carousel ad-enabled us to promote a catalogue of releases, with each card in the ad promoting a different film and linking to that title on a particular VOD platform. The campaign subsequently launched on Wednesday, March 18.
The preliminary results were excellent: we saw an astonishing conversion rate of 26% at a cost of €0.13 per conversion. Compared to previous campaigns these results were 66% cheaper and three times more effective!
Why Is This Happening?
With entire countries on lockdown, there have never been more people online: this huge captive audience in search of entertainment caused the cost of advertising to drop by 10 X.
There has never been a better time to build customer numbers for your VOD platform. You need a smaller budget than previously imaginable, and your captive audience is more engaged than ever before: without the regular distractions of day-to-day life they have the headspace to watch more challenging independent movies.
Cineman.pl and VOD.pl are two local TVOD operators in Poland, with Parasite, Pain & Glory, Midsommar, Loro and Everybody Knows available on both platforms.
We divided our ads into two groups, with one driving audiences to Cineman.pl and the other to VOD.pl. The goal was to understand the following:
- Audience preferences - which of the platforms would generate the most page visits and conversions?
- Creative preferences - which movie cards on the carousel ad would users click on the most?
- Estimate conversions - how were page visits converting into a transaction, either of the initial film they clicked on or of another title on offer?
For further information about the study CONTACT US
The Results
Both VOD.pl and Cineman.pl were able to supply sales information very quickly: here are the results from the first five days of the campaign:
In less than a week the campaign generated 2,596 movie transactions worth €6880, at a cost per conversion of €0.13.
The following chart compares the results generated by the campaign over five days in March with results from a similar five day period in February:
During the first five days of the campaign, we saw 3X times more purchases on Cineman.pl and 2X more purchases on VOD.pl.
NOTESNeither VOD.pl nor Cineman.pl allowed us to set up tracking on their sites, so we cannot be 100% certain that our campaign was responsible for the entire growth in sales. In order to make a conclusion, we should be looking at a percentage of sales increase versus an average sales rate in previous months.
Many VOD platforms are unwilling or unable to frequently share sales results, or allow the set up required for this type of tracking on behalf of a distributor. If we had access to VOD platforms from a conversion tracking perspective the work we could do in building audience data sets would be even stronger: developing sales, encouraging members to revisit the service & transact, as well as increase the lifetime sales value of each audience member.
