The marketing campaign for The Hunger Games trilogy has a history of treating fans as citizens of the fictional nation of Panem from the series - in particular, as citizen of the Capitol. The Capitol in Suzanne Collins' hugely popular series is a satirisation of modern Western civilisation, a high tech city of opulence and avant garde fashion, as shown on the reality bending, official promotional Capitol Couture website. The site mixes fiction and reality in a seamless blend which is only aided by real-world promotion of fictional products from the series.
You can read more about past promotional efforts by the marketing team in this Buzzfeed article, which outlines exactly how campaigns based around making a fictional universe seem real can sometimes work better than just advertising a fictional movie, as is tradition.
Lionsgate continued down this path on Sunday, when the official Hunger Games facebook page made this post:
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The next day a link to President Snow's video message was hosted - but before Snow even appeared on screen it was "hijacked" by the rebellion from the novels, symbolised by the Mockingjay bird, and replaced with binary code.
And that was it. That was all the fans got. So, without further ado, they went about cracking the binary code. Once decoded, the binary instructed fans ("Citizens of Panem") to visit a list of seemingly unrelated websites in order to "view a special message from the Mockingjay."
The next stage of the mission wasn't as simple as it seemed, however. Fans had to delve into the HTML code of each of the sites listed to uncover their next instructions: Use #UnlockMockingjay to receive unreleased bonus content from the movie.
So that's what the fans did. They took to Twitter, and suddenly the advertising campaign was accessible to a much wider range of people. What had started out with comparatively few, dedicated fans was now available to those who hadn't been able to view or decode the original video and sites due to other commitments, and to casual fans as well. Using a hashtag is second nature to much of The Hunger Games young adult audience, so it made sense that a huge swathe of them were happy to do their part and it wasn't long before #UnlockMockingjay started trending.
Once trending, the hashtag was then able to draw the attention of not only casual viewers but also a totally new audience. The scope of its popularity made it hard to ignore, and curious browsers may have been drawn in by the spectacle, eager to see what had so many people repetitively tweeting.
Eventually fans discovered a website that appeared to be tracking the popularity of the hashtag and loading accordingly. In a painstakingly slow process, the site revealed the Capitol logo gradually being replaced by a mockingjay. The slow progress frustrated some fans, but it was no doubt an effective way to build expectations. The visual measurement of their success was also a good way to keep fans engaged; they always had something to come back and check their progress against.
Another clever part of the campaign was the way it encouraged a sense of community within the fandom, uniting them with a common goal and giving them good reason to ask outsiders to join them in achieving this common goal. Existing fans may have asked friends who weren't as involved with the fandom to also use the hashtag to help speed up the process.
Just when the site had loaded to 90%, and the fans were so close to their ultimate goal, a low resolution version of the deleted scene leaked on tumblr. Some proposed that the leak wasn't 'genuine', but rather another marketing ploy in this convoluted plot, designed merely to keep fans interested by reminding them what they had been waiting on and working for over the past few hours. Either way, the leaked scene did nothing to slow the progress of the campaign. Rather, it created more interest as people re-blogged, re-posted and re-tweeted the low quality scene still using #UnlockMockingjay.
With this new surge it wasn't long before the countdown website had fully loaded and the high resolution clip was available for anyone with the link to enjoy.
This campaign was certainly an effective one in terms of online presence. The Hunger Games book series is categorised as young adult, so it makes sense that the marketing team at Lionsgate have targeted that same audience by reaching out to them on the platforms they've made their own - tumblr, twitter and facebook. The entire exercise would have greatly increased their SEO and certainly got them a fair amount of online media attention, both within the fandom and outside of it.
What do you think of this campaign and others like it that have gone viral? Are they effective ways to engage paying fans, or does their success only last as long as their hype? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
To learn about how you can use this campaign as inspiration for your own online advertising and how to make the most of social media to interact with your clients, you can check out our article on customer interaction.
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