Viral challenges on social media to promote films – Do they work?
“We are the movies and the movies are us,” well-known US film critic David Ansen had said to highlight the key role that movies play in people’s lives. And it couldn’t be more true in the case of India, where people live and breathe cinema. This is reflected in the number of films released in the country every year across languages and genres.
Along with the film’s release, the launch of a film’s promotion campaign has become as momentous an occasion as the film hitting the silver screen. While earlier, the trailer usually hit the screens a few weeks before the film’s release in theatres, today the films’ producers and directors have become more marketing savvy. Thus, we see a sustained interest being created throughout the journey of the film’s making to its theatre release. There is the release of the ‘first look’, then poster/ motion poster release, shots from the film’s sets, short videos on the behind-the-scenes activities, release of a teaser trailer, song release, release of the film’s trailer, promotion on some popular TV show by the film’s lead actors and then finally the film is released in theatres.
Various media platforms are used to promote the film and engage the viewers. Thus, huge budgets are allocated for the film’s marketing. Innovation is the name of the game here.
For some time now, we have see actors of a film throwing up some kind of ‘challenge’ for their peers in the film industry or even their fans on social media. Some time back, we saw Tiger Shroff doing some signature dance moves from his song ‘Beat Pe Booty’ from the film ‘Flying Jatt’ and asking his friends from the industry and fans to match him step for step and post their videos on social media. This spread like wildfire.
Then we had the film fraternity posing while holding a sanitary napkin as part of the ‘Padman’ challenge for the Akshay Kumar starrer. This challenge was widely reported in media as well and helped spread an important social message along with promoting the film.
Television czarina, Ekta Kapoor is also nominating other celebrities for a riveting challenge as part of the promotions for Balaji Telefilm’s new web series, ‘Home’.
At the same time, Patil maintained that such ‘challenge’-based promotions are done to create virality to get it to spread by engaging celebrities and then the common people.
At the same time, Oshidar said that he was not a big fan of such activities. “I don’t think that it provides any kind of boost, all it does is that it makes it more specific and captures the imagination of the people. If a challenge itself is something which catches attention, then it works, but if it is something random which has no meaning, then it’s just a crap for me.”