Insight
Teens are hard to reach. Harder to impress. And will try their hardest to avoid traditional advertising. They are not prepared to give you 30 seconds. Teens’ lives are a series of one liners. In texts. In posts. In tweets. They digest a lot of little.
Strategy
So how would Paramount Pictures get teens to ‘experience’ a new character 'Bad Grandpa'? Just as life imitates art, its strategy imitated teens. No ‘back-story’. No ‘story-telling’. No deep and meaningful content. Working with MEC, it would hit this teen market with a series of low-brow one-liners Puerile, immature and toilet. 100% in the character of Bad Grandpa. Topical. Controversial. And above all shareable. IDEA: Low-brow one-liners.
Execution
For teens, where is the home of one-liners? Twitter. Twitter was low cost, immediate and under-utilised creatively by advertisers. Low cost. The campaign budget didn’t allow for elaborate or extensive use of channels beyond TV for the trailer and buses for the poster. Twitter enabled MEC to drive engagement and address the inherent issue with the film – an unknown character.
A bigger problem was that it didn’t have the budget to employ Hollywood screenwriters for its Tweets. But strangely enough the budget did stretch to an existing overhead – the young guys in the agency. Immediate. Twitter allowed them to jump into the character of Bad Grandpa and comment on events as they happen…sort of what the channel is really good at. From twerking to Abbot’s daughters to Bill Shorten’s ‘shorten’ to schoolies to Sydney’s Wet & Wild. And then the usual boobs and balls jokes. Creative. Twitter is the graveyard of creativity for agencies.
Beyond having a Twitter account and paying for sponsored tweets very little is being done here. Brands have Twitter turned on but they don’t know how to turn on their consumers. Johnny Knoxville [creator and star of Jackass] loved the idea of Bad Grandpa tweeting…but wanted to approve every tweet. After the first six he felt they had a handle on the character and the agency was given free reign. Great news because one of the first tweets was about Abbot’s daughters and it took a lot of explaining (Johnny didn’t know who Tony was).
Results
This idea and creative license was unique to Australia. No other market in the world used Twitter to personify Bad Grandpa. In the first week it was number one at the box office. Knocking off the massively supported blockbuster Thor in only its second week. It held at number two in the following two weeks of The Hunger Games onslaught. It annihilated the box office target by 155%, taking in $9.3m after four weeks. Between tweets and the retweets (1,881) it generated a massive viral reach of over 1.5 million impressions. The tweets had a staggering engagement rate, with 7.3% of people retweeting, favouriting or responding (benchmark 1.5%]. It drove an additional 48,249 trailer views directly from the tweets.
The Bad Grandpa skinned Twitter following grew by 42%. Tweets were reposted on Facebook from which it generated over 93,000 facebook fans. This then made Australia the most successful Bad Grandpa facebook campaign in the world. This pushed Australia to a 33% global share on facebook! The US, it’s main market, only achieved 9% share. A real indication of the huge contribution the unique Twitter approach achieved.
"Our twitter campaign was an incredibly clever use of the channel never seen before and one of the highlights of our marketing strategy. It really brought the Bad Grandpa character to life in all his glory for a hard to reach audience. The result far exceeded our expectations and contributed to what was a very successful film for us." - Kelly Collier, Media Manager, Paramount Pictures Australia.