Lionsgate

Situation

For the launch of the Hunger Games, Lionsgate turned to Hipcricket as a one-stop mobile marketing and advertising solution for designing and implementing a comprehensive campaign to attract, engage, and re-target audiences on the mobile device.

Objective

• Lionsgate sought to attract a younger audience of active mobile users.
• Lionsgate wanted to provide users the same experience visiting the desktop website or the mobile website and offer the same engagement to all mobile users – smartphones or feature phones owners.
• Lionsgate wanted to re-target these mobile users weeks after the release to encourage ticket purchase.

Solutions

• In partnership with Ignition Interactive, Hipcricket created a Facebook connected site for smartphones that used an API to create a campaign that tightly integrated with the film’s online and social media presence through the mobile device of their choice—with creative tailored for smartphones, tablets and text-only enabled cell phones.
• Hipcricket handled the creative as well as the media buy for the campaign, placing ads on relevant online gaming and sports properties such as Gamespot and Words With Friends to encourage engagement on the mobile site.
• Post-click, fans were brought to the mobile website—utilizing Hipcricket’s patented technology to render correctly on any mobile device—which empowered them to engage with the film in a number of highly-relevant ways, including:
  • Finding nearby theatres and showtimes, through the site’s location-based services;
  • Viewing video trailers for the film, which are embedded directly in the site;
  • Connecting with the film’s “What’s My District” application on Facebook to create their own District Identification Pass, all from their mobile device via Facebook Connect;
  • Purchasing tickets through one-click access to Fandango.
• Hipcricket tied in customer relationship management (CRM) by creating a VIP club for Hunger Games fans who preferred to engage via SMS. Hipcricket conducted online ad campaigns suggesting that fans text THG to 48141, at which point they are assigned their District Identification Pass and directed to the film’s website.
• Several Hipcricket products (mobile advertising, SMS, MMS and Mobile web) were used to accommodate the level of sophistication of the end user’s device, thus giving the best user experience as possible for the end user’s phone (feature or smartphone).

Results

• The movie broke all previous opening weekend records for box office purchases made with mobile devices.
• 5% CTR on iPad video Ad units.
• 1.5 CRT on smartphone video ad units.
• Overall 1.4% media campaign clickthrough rate.
• Over $150M US dollars in opening weekend box office, the third largest opening weekend gross of all time.

“Hipcricket created a comprehensive mobile campaign that enabled us to engage with all of our fans regardless of their mobile device’s operating system,” stated Danielle De Palma, SVP Digital Media for Lionsgate. “This film had an extremely mobile-savvy audience, so it was important for us to create a great experience. Hipcricket empowered us to accomplish this goal and played an important role in making The Hunger Games’ opening weekend a record-breaking success.”