Case Study: How Star Movies turned negative comments into promotional content for Endgame

To announce the new premiere date for Avengers: Endgame, Star Movies created memes from anguish-filled comments fans had left for them, leveraging the existing noise on social media through strategic content push.

With the scheduled premiere of Endgame getting pushed from April 26, Star Movies could see a lot of negative sentiment around the uncertainty of the new date. They tracked the comments and transformed those messages of displeasure into memes to promote the new date. The Endgame centric campaign run by Star Movies was aimed at simultaneously driving home the new premiere date while redressing the anguish of fans.

Category Introduction

The English Movies reach out to nearly 50 million viewers every month through television. There are six major channels in India viz. Star Movies, Movies Now, Sony Pix, HBO, &flix and MNX. The highlight of the month for all the channels is usually the ‘Indian Television Premieres’ of recently released movies. The peripheral elements include movie festival on weekends and weekdays.

Brand Introduction 

Star Movies is one of the first English movie channels to be launched in India. The channel broadcasts at least one Hollywood movie premiere each month. With a large fan base all over India, Star Movies has been using various social media platforms to interact with them. The constant fan engagement over digital platforms has kept the lover and appreciation flowing from both ends.

Summary

When the initial release was postponed, the brand received a lot of negative comments. Instead of replying to these statements typically, the channel used the comments to create some love for the brand and reinforce the date of the premiere of Endgame on social media. The insight was that the negative comments were in fact love for the movie, not hatred towards the channel. So, negative comments were used to create movie-specific memes, address them in a unique way by creating content out of it and to remind people of the launch date using memes.

Problem Statement/Objective

How does a brand deal with negative sentiments on social media? Instead of typically closing the cases with an apology, the channel addressed individual comments on their content, in line with the campaign objective of asking people to tune in to the TV for the television premiere of Avengers: Endgame.

Brief

Using no media money, come up with a campaign that addresses consumer grievances along with reinforcing the new premiere date.

Execution 

The core of every element of the campaign were fans comments expressing their feelings. These were then packaged in a meme form and shared using digital platforms. Facebook Twitter and Instagram were used for the same.

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Results

The campaign was able to garner 376,761 Impressions on Facebook, 536,670 on Instagram and 121,162 on Twitter. Reach on Facebook was 354,246 and 412,839 on Instagram. The Engagement was 7628 (2.15%) on Facebook, 25,267 (6.12%) on Instagram and 8,146 (6.72%) on Twitter.