Twitter’s New Marketing Pitch to Studios – The Hollywood Reporter

In late October, Twitter and Warner Bros. unveiled its #DuneWeek advertising marketing campaign to drum up fan pleasure across the star-studded sci-fi movie hitting theaters and HBO Max on Oct. 22, with almost the entire essential solid and director Denis Villeneuve taking turns answering fan questions concerning the world of Arrakis and their respective characters for the week-long advertising marketing campaign that introduced collectively fan Twitter and Hollywood.
But these interactions weren’t taking place on a Warner Bros. or HBO Max Twitter account. Instead, unique content material for #DuneWeek happened on the Twitter-operated @TwitterFilms deal with, which has been positioning itself as a chief location for studios and advertisers to attain audiences, totally free.

While studios pays for promotions on Twitter (which Warner Bros. did for its Dune promotions elsewhere on the platform), advertising on @TwitterFilms — and its TV counterpart @TwitterTV — permits studios’ advertising groups to have one other alternative to promote and obtain natural engagement on their respective tasks, whereas Twitter can increase its presence on the deal with and deepen relationships with studios for future paid partnerships and providers.
In the case of #DuneWeek, by utilizing @TwitterFilms for particular promotion, Warner Bros. was ready to leverage the account’s preexisting hundreds of thousands of followers — the deal with has been gaining followers since Dec. 2011 — whereas the standalone Dune account solely began turning into energetic in 2020 to coincide with early promotion for the movie.
“We don’t solicit any charge to work with @TwitterFilms, and we don’t select our tasks primarily based on the quantity a studio is spending on an total Twitter advertising marketing campaign,” James Brownstein, Twitter’s head of movie partnerships, tells The Hollywood Reporter by way of electronic mail. “But after we accomplice on an natural content material marketing campaign on @TwitterFilms that performs very well, it reminds advertisers how necessary our platform is for reaching an viewers who will purchase film tickets or subscriptions.”
Engagement on the @TwitterFilms deal with, which has 6.8 million followers, has grown by 674 p.c since 2020, ballooning from 3.9 million engagements (likes, retweets, quote retweets, replies and video views) in 2020 to 30.1 million engagements in 2021, in accordance to Twitter. Brownstein says Twitter ran watch events, Q&As with expertise and different interactions with followers to assist studio companions and show Twitter’s affect and impression within the advertising house, which helped drive progress between 2020 and 2021 amid altering launch schedules and hybrid fashions due to the pandemic.

“We put in years of labor to present our companions that we are able to drive actually efficient natural content material advertising campaigns on Twitter,” Brownstein says. “As we entered a packed 2021 slate, we had a ton of momentum and belief with our high companions, and this helped us to actually speed up.”
Amy Sligh, the social advertising lead for Twitter’s leisure verticals, additionally notes that posts on @TwitterFilms that carry out nicely organically could get an additional “paid increase” to attain much more customers.
But a shift in tone away from pure advertising language has additionally helped @TwitterFilms turn into a extra fan-centric hub to higher join with film lovers, in accordance to Sligh. “Over the previous few years, our method to @TwitterFilms has shifted from being extra promotional to talking with followers as followers,” Sligh says, pointing to tweets that reference memes or different on-line developments. “We couldn’t do the identical issues in 2020 that we did in years prior due to the pandemic. So, in 2021, we had to create new methods to take part within the dialog which, satirically, took the deal with to a brand new degree.”
At the tip of 2021, different main advertising blitzes unique to the @TwitterFilms deal with included clips of The Matrix Resurrections stars Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss answering fan questions on returning to the franchise; Spider-Man: No Way Home stars Tom Holland, Zendaya and Jacob Batalon reacting to fan tweets; West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler explaining a few of her previous tweets; and Last Night in Soho director Edgar Wright answering fan questions.
Dustin Sandoval, vp digital advertising at Disney Studios, tells THR that utilizing the @TwitterFilms and @TwitterTV accounts permits Disney to attain a extra normal viewers who won’t already be following well-liked Disney manufacturers like Marvel and Pixar on Twitter.
“Working with that deal with provides us a possibility to attain somewhat bit additional and probably even a broader viewers, realizing that we nonetheless have hundreds of thousands of followers on our @MarvelStudios deal with, massive Marvel’s deal with,” Sandoval says. “But @TwitterFilms is film followers, so we are able to attain a pleasant normal viewers of simply people who find themselves all loving the identical factor and expose them to among the stuff that we’re doing.”
Already, Sandoval says Disney is having conversations with Twitter for upcoming promotions across the upcoming Doctor Strange within the Multiverse of Madness movie, which is anticipated to launch on May 6. And wanting forward on the 2022 schedule, Sandoval says he’s personally excited for activations across the extremely anticipated Avatar sequel that may resonate with the fandom.
“We concentrate to all the things that every one of our followers are saying and are actually tuned in to what they’re gravitating towards, and we love to allow them to know, ‘Hey, we see you and also you hear you’ by placing out one thing that feels prefer it’s a tweet that they’d do,” Sandoval says. “It’s actually enjoyable to see.”
This story first appeared within the Jan. 12 challenge of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click right here to subscribe.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/enterprise/digital/twitter-movies-marketing-disney-warner-bros-1235073641/