Is Facebook More Effective Than a Super Bowl Ad?

When it comes to movies, volume and sentiment can predict box office revenues and a social media campaign is more powerful than a Super Bowl ad, said Eric Kuhn at yessterday’s Business Insider’s Social Media Analytics Conference.

Using a measurement tool developed at Harvard, Kuhn, an agent with United Artists Agency, is hoping to show that social buzz is a powerful force in Hollywood where even a single Tweet can change ticket sales.

Traditionally, the film industry uses a measure of both public interest and awareness of a film 4-weeks before release to predict the opening weekend box office.

But now, by measuring social media sentiment - positive, negative or neutral - and the volume of that conversation, studios can begin to predict similar results up to several months before an opening weekend, explains Kuhn.

Positive or negative sentiment on social media has no effect on the opening weekend gross, instead it is the volume or number of mentions that indicates the strength of the first box office in relation to other films.

Sentiment comes in to play when forecasting long term gross, positive buzz correlating to better ticket sales in the weekends following release.

Yet, sentiment is not a static measurement and even a single Tweet change the fate of a film if it comes from the right person.

 

Bridesmaids, for example, debuted to a good box office last summer, but faced a serious challenge for comedy market share when The Hangover 2 opened last summer.

Yet after Taylor Swift tweeted “PS I’m STILL laughing from seeing Bridesmaids two days ago” positive sentiments increased by 22%.

Ultimately, such buzz led the film to gross $152.9 million total - dethroning Sex and the City as the highest grossing female comedy of all time - and be dubbed “the movie that Twitter built” by director Paul Feig.

While Twitter contributed to the buzz and success of Bridesmaids, traditionally, it has been accepted that the ultimate buzz creator for movies is a Super Bowl ad.

Last year, the trailer for Transformers: Dark of the Moon was aired on the Super Bowl to 111 million viewer and received 37,634 mentions on Twitter as the second most popular commercial of the day, noted Kuhn.

Recently, Disney took a chance and decided to premiere the trailer for The Avengers – a blockbuster movie with a similar audience to Transformers – on Facebook and received over 61,000 mentions.

For those doing the math, that is about 40% more mentions on a channel that is free compared to the Super Bowl that costs $3 million an ad (and Transformers had three).

If The Avengers can surpass the Transformers’  $352,390,543 gross, film marketers, and all marketers really, should take a serious look at their media investments and decide if the majority of their budgets should really be going into television or if they might be better used elsewhere.

But whether that will happen is yet to be know as The Avengers doesn’t open until May 4, 2012, but Kuhn seems to think that the repeated social engagement consumers will have with the film until then will mean big gross.

“When people are social with something they want to do,” said Kuhn, “it makes them more likely to actually do it.”