Digital Campaigns
Online promotion is not straightforward. It seems to stimulate an incredible level of creativity. The possibilities are endless to market Bollywood movies abroad when you think outside of the box with website creation and social campaigns. The digital market campaigning was popularized by the film ‘Bang Bang’ in 2014. The popular #BangBangDares filled the feed of both the home and the west audience and it also set an example how the actors and actress community can come together crossing the distance barriers and show some love by being a part of such promotion.
One of the mega hit Campaign was initiated by the blockbuster film ‘Pad Man’ where the ’grammars all around the world joined in and posted pictures holding a sanitary napkin, with the hastag #PadManChallenge. Taking such initiatives to a global scale, if producers put their big bucks in innovatively online marketing films through digital campaigns, they can, virtually conquer western markets!
Games
Today, movies are marketed in a direction which would lead to maximization of awareness and games are a medium which transcend all the age and territorial barriers. Bollywood entered the gaming industry with a bang! It aimed to make more profits out of innovative games which were set out on various platforms like Playstore Appstore, X-Box and Playstation.
One popular movie that developed a game with the theme of the film was Ra One. “Ra One- The Game”, was made a Sony PlayStation game. It gained high popularity as it used the characters of the film in the game. What worked in favor was that they didn’t disclose the suspense of the movie, leaving the audience with high expectations from the movie.
This is one of the remarkable ways to engage the western audience and make your movie a brand. Taking this idea to the next level, one needs to stay ahead of the competition and to do the same, Augmented & Virtual Reality Games are the way forward. Let us discuss how these upcoming trends can help tap potential audiences in the west.
Augmented Reality (AR)
Augmented Reality (AR), for the cinema comes across a very unique solution to engage and interact with the audience all across the globe. It is one of the most powerful mediums of spreading awareness much before the film hits the screen.
With the increase of number of movie releases every week, the production houses of the movies have started inculcating the augmented reality (AR) as well as the extended reality (XR) for such promotion in the market. Ranbir Kapoor starring Bollywood chartbuster movie, ‘Sanju’ used AR and it became the first Bollywood film to cross 500,000 impressions in a week, ultimately reaching almost 1.7 million people all across the globe. AR was further explored by the western audience with the release of the Blockbuster film ‘Super 30’ which allowed a virtual tour of the classroom where Hrithik’s character was witnessed welcoming such user. Such cutting-edge technology usage can help Bollywood movies gain momentum and success for Bollywood movies across the world.
Artificial Intelligence: The game-changer
People are the center of all marketing efforts. Thus, understanding the sentiments of the people is the most crucial when it comes to devising any campaign or marketing any film, anywhere in the world. The west is a different market. And Artificial Intelligence can work wonders in helping us understand the lifestyle and entertainment consumables of the audience.
All of these sentiments is data. And data drives artificial intelligence. In any industry, including film-making, data insights help reveal trends and user preferences. These can be sued to devise and drive apt digital campaigns, in line with what can work for the potential western audiences.
Artificial Intelligence can be a tech-driven revolution in film marketing. Typically, computers equipped with AI are capable of churning out massive amounts of qualitative as well as quantitative data. They can then analyze the data to create remarkable solutions and products. Using Sentiment Analysis, an Artificial Intelligence tool, producers can draw optimum results about your marketing campaigns. This is tool showcases what the audience feels about the products, what are they talking about it and the brand opinions that are being formed in the market.
By collecting and monitoring your marketing metrics properly, producers can discover trends that may have a strong impact and leverage them to open up chances to capitalize on a successful campaign (or alter a failing one), engage fans more closely, and tap cross-promotional opportunities when marketing.
Not just while marketing, AI-driven platforms can even help Bollywood movie producers analyze movie trailers to determine the potential revenue generation. This is done by crunching data like views, shares, likes and other forms of online engagement. As a result, a studio can change a trailer to make it more impactful among the western audience.
In Conclusion: The Future Ahead
Bollywood’s journey to going global has been a rollercoaster ride. From maintaining a separate budget to promote a film in the market, to investing the same digitally in order to make more and more money, today, the secret weapon to unleashing profits is to leverage digital in the context of promotion and earn revenue not just nationally, but internationally.
Today, movie watchers round the world spend more time staying online or using their mobile phones in comparison to reading newspaper or watching television. Hence, new media has an extensive stay and influence in their daily life. Online websites are increasingly accessible with the movie going audience and they are dependent on internet for movie information such as songs, movie release date, cast, gossip, etc. These audiences tend to turn up online before deciding to go for a film or not.
The Bollywood film industry is relentlessly on the lookout for new and advanced marketing techniques to promote a movie and target a mass audience. Today film promotions have gone afar, from releasing the teasers and trailers in theatres. The marketing teams spend colossal efforts to formulate well-structured film marketing strategies so that they can get the audience queuing up to buy the tickets. Digital Marketing has become an efficacious way to grab the audience and establish a bond with them. Its scope encompasses a lot of fun activities such as live streaming of music launches, contests on the social media, Google hangouts along with the crew, digitalized advertisements on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. This Social media buzz hence proves to be the essence of driving the audiences to the new releases.
This shift of the producers and makers of the film towards the digitization in order to promote the upcoming film is now a trend which comes out as a potential way to build up a deeper connection with the audience. The utmost advantage by choosing this medium is the effectiveness post such implementation of the strategy which can be easily weighed with the help of the performance metrics. It not just helps the digital market experts to take the right and insightful decisions for formulation of future strategies but it also reduces costs and increases the productivity so desired from such promotional campaigns.
The Bollywood industry has also witnessed humongous innovation in the recent years along with the enhancement of immersive technologies. Filmmakers nowadays can access the global market from West to East and North to South with the help of various non-conventional techniques such as live streaming of launches using Augmented Reality (AR), 360 degree campaigns, mobile games and interactive posts on social media platforms, to name a few. Also, not just the teaser and trailers are promoted but behind-the-scenes content and social media contests make a way for these films much before their release leading to massive box-office success.
Thus, the new media is substantiating to be a largely successful medium and it is apparent that it will have a larger role to play in the coming years. “In the making of a film, you have to be innovative. In marketing the film, you have to be even more so.” Shahid Kapoor, a Bollywood actor. No wonder, with such global platforms in the form of digital media, that day is not far when Bollywood producers can make a global footprint, making their movies a brand and tapping western audiences.
