Final Project: Disney’s Cruella Marketing Campaign
On May 28th, 2021 The Walt Disney Company will release their new film, Cruella, in theaters and on Disney+ with a Premiere Access purchase. For this project, we will be creating a Social Media Marketing Campaign. The campaign will focus on advertising the film and pushing those Premiere Access sales. Although the global Covid-19 pandemic is lightening up, audience’s can agree that it is safer to watch the film at home. With this idea in mind, we can further establish our SMART goal. We want to increase the number of Premiere Access sales for Cruella by the end of its second weekend (June 4th, 2021) by 15%. By setting this goal we can achieve other goals along the way. When running this campaign we will not only raise awareness around the film but around Disney+ and it’s many features. In order to stream Cruella with premiere access, the customer must first have a Disney+ subscription. If the customer does not, they can apply for their Free 7-Day trial and apply their credit card upon activation, allowing them to pay for Cruella with Premiere Access. When strategizing this plan, we will heavily focus on influencers and utilize Instagram as our main platform. We will also advertise on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and run other basic online ads, but Instagram will work best for our strategy. Our plan will change throughout the time of the event from pre-event to post-event and everything in between.
For our campaign we will focus on targeting our family audience on Instagram. We want to promote this film to families who love Disney and love to watch Disney movies together. For this particular platform we want to utilize our Social Media Influencers that we have collaborated with in the past. For example, popular magician and digital creator Zach King creating a short video for Disney+ on Instagram to promote Mulan on Premiere Access in September of 2020. Utilizing relationships we already have in place can set us up for success. Creating content which pushes that idea of spending time with your family, safe at home, can really help us achieve our goal. On the other platforms, the content we create will target adults and young adults. The Disney Villains “franchise” has been proven popular amongst this demographic for several years. The Walt Disney Company has set in place multiple night-time events at their theme parks centered around their Villain characters, including Cruella DeVil, and the ticketed events although not always as satisfying were still selling out. The mystery and edge that helps identify these characters seem to resonate more with those who are anywhere from 18–35, may be single or rebellious, and have a fair love for The Walt Disney Company. With this in mind, we can target this audience with ads via Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Throughout all of the platforms we want the tone and voice for this campaign to remain edgy, sinister, and cool. Being that Cruella is portrayed as a person who was done wrong too many times in the film, we can hone in on that character to create appropriate copy for the posts. The hashtags to be used in the campaign will include #Cruella and #DisneyPlus. These hashtags are simple and clean and match the aesthetic of our platforms already. These hashtags are also relevant enough to encourage others to use them. They do not confuse the audience and can easily flow within sentence structure when creating copy. When strategizing a campaign with two target audiences, it is important to stay on track and schedule posts accordingly. These diverse target audience’s are important so we can promote the film and the Premiere Access feature for Disney+ all at the same time, creating business conversions and better brand awareness.
When it comes to measuring the campaign, we plan to analyze the obvious amount of Premiere Access purchases. But in order to determine the campaigns success, we will need measure the amount of Premiere Access purchases completed via a link in one of our social media ads. In our ads, we can attach a direct link to the film on Disney+. If the customer already has a Disney+ account, and is logged in on that device, they will automatically be directed to the film’s slot on the platform and given the option to proceed with their Premiere Access purchase. If the customer does have a Disney+ account, but are not yet logged into that particular device they will be asked to sign in before proceeding to checkout the film. If the customer does not yet have a Disney+ account, they will be advised to create an account and once their information is confirmed and their account is active, they will then be redirected to the film’s slot for Premiere Access purchase. This link will allow us to collect information based on if the customer was already a Disney+ subscriber and to see of our Cruella campaign was strong enough to draw in new subscribers. We can measure this during “pre-event” to see how many new subscribers apply for an account with an ad before the film is available to stream. We can also track to see how fast our new subscribers purchase and watch the film. This will help us determine their true purpose of creating an account. When it comes to our established subscribers, we can measure their activity via the links in our ads to see how many of them decided to purchase the Premiere Access option via the ad, or while they were planning to stream something else on the platform. Measuring our success of this campaign should be rather simple, however we must stay diligent and active and remain present throughout the process on all platforms.