The campaign succeeded in changing perceptions towards the festival and the behaviour of people - recording a record number of attendees in the history of the event.
- Record number of ticket sales with attendance up 35%
- Total package sales up 88%
- Student attendance up 50%
- Facebook/Twitter fans doubled to 34,765 & 30,861 respectively.
- DIFF website received over 100% unique visits
- DIFF mobile site received over 950% unique visits
- DIFF YouTube Channel receiving 1,150,400 views compared to 160,000 views from last year. Almost 10 times more than the previous year.
Creative Execution
We wanted to give everyone the opportunity to take the test.
Since YouTube is the main hotspot for people to watch movie trailers, we gave them the chance to engage through a unique video test purposely designed for this medium.
Once you enter, there are a total of five Inkblots. When the first appears, a series of words soon follow. You click on the word you think best represents the Inkblot, and then the video jumps directly to the second Inkblot. After all five, in just five clicks, you get your film genre preference and the trailer of a film you may be interested in watching at the festival with the option to buy tickets.
Since YouTube videos can be embedded on external social media websites, the video test was simple to take and easy to share – meaning all your friends could watch your trailer without even taking the test.
Insights, Strategy and the Idea
With a strong variety of film showcasing at The Dubai International Film Festival, attendance rates were still lower than expected last year with people preferring to watch mainstream movies at the cinema than attend the festival.
People were not relating to DIFF. And we had to convert these cinemagoers into festivalgoers.
The truth about film is that everyone sees it differently. And we wanted to take this problem of perception and used it our advantage.
Inspired by this, we teamed up with acclaimed Clinical Psychologist Dr. Raymond Hamden to create the 'DIFF Film Personality Test'. A series of Inkblots with results, gathered over a two-month period, based on genuine film-related psychometric results.
What people interpreted determined the film genre they may be interested in before the festival actually begins. And they could buy tickets for these films well in advance - so were building followers nice and early.