Facebook’s First-Ever Content Partnership

Case Study: American Teen

The Film: Nanette Burnstein’s American Teen follows five high school seniors in Small Town Indiana and the triumphs and heartbreaks that gate their passage into the Big Wide World.

The Problem: Having been accepted to the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Burnstein and her producing team (A&E IndieFilms) needed to cut through the clutter of the 100+ features at Sundance to secure an attractive global distribution deal.

The Solution: I was sourced by A&E and Facebook build one of the first Fan Pages and fill it with rich content, update it regularly, and drive the right audiences to it. During Sundance, Paramount Vantage announced that it had acquired the worldwide distribution rights to American Teen.

  1. In just two hours, I built out facebook.com/americanteen as well as Facebook Actor Pages for the film’s stars.
  2. To keep fans engaged, I shadowed the cast of American Teen to videotape their trip to Sundance and posted over 30 short videos over the course of a week.
  3. As one of the first social targeting campaigns, we used new Facebook technology to devise a highly targeted advertising campaign to reach the right audiences.
    • Residents of Warsaw, IN saw an ad specifically mentioning the local high school where the documentary was filmed. These users quickly became active contributors to the Page, bringing the drama of the film to its Facebook Film Page.
    • Young residents of Salt Lake City, UT saw an ad that drew them into the film’s Sundance screenings.
    • Employees of the major film studios and film finance companies and journalists from top newspapers and news networks saw an ad referencing press coverage of the film.
    • Fans of The Breakfast Club saw an ad specifically mentioning the parallels to that film.

    Driving Return on Investment: What made the American Teen campaign successful was not that it reached so many people, but that it reached the right people—the core base of fans and tastemakers the team wanted to see, discuss, and spread the film virally to their friends. Every time one of these users wrote a review, participated in a discussion, or RSVP’ed to a screening time, News Feed stories and Social Ads about American Teen went out to their friends.

    On January 23rd, Paramount announced that it had acquired the worldwide distribution rights to American Teen for a reported $2.5 million (indieWIRE) amidst what otherwise proved to be a slow Festival for sales.

Date

January 17, 2008

Category

Greatest Hits, Social