How to run in-house marketing of online cinema & original series
About the way teams interact with one another
The START online cinema maintains its leadership in the production of originals: our Studio’s own series and films, created in-house. In the first half of 2023, we launched 19 originals, with our marketing team ensuring that each of them reached the intended audience. Ekaterina Bashmachnikova, Director of the Marketing Department, shares insights into our working processes and explains how we have been overcoming challenges over the recent years.
About the structure and the team
Currently, the department employs 57 people. The marketing department has its own creative hub. This hub is powered by designers and the project launch division, which comprises creative duos and video promo creators. We also have a content marketing division that manages social media and creates “making-of” movies about our movies, which constitute fully fledged products in their own right. There is also a department dedicated to digital marketing and media buying.This department has three significant tactical streams. The first is media buying, its team responsible for purchasing advertisements with extensive outreach and the highest visibility. They start by planning and liaising with advertising agencies, then proceed to develop strategies, purchase advertisements, and handle reports. Then, we have our performance marketing unit. Its team sets up contextual advertising, works on a CPA (cost per action) model with lead generators, and launches mobile advertising. The direct marketing division handles internal communications with users. In other words, it’s in charge of what our subscribers are shown in push notifications, emails, and messages within the service itself. We are currently focusing our efforts on introducing pull notifications: messages sent to the user’s personal account. This project is a collaborative effort with the product team to establish another touchpoint with our audience. We also operate a brand division that focuses on the START brand’s strategy and growth. Overall, these are the five major essential streams.
Each of the five streams is headed by a lead. The leads have various ways of communicating within their teams: some have additional leads whom tasks are cascaded to if there are several groups within the department. If a lead has only one group, they engage with their line experts and specialists directly. In other words, the structure can slightly differ depending on the division. That said, we conduct weekly reviews of all marketing activities. These meetings alternate. One week, we meet as a very large group, including guests from the PR team. And in other weeks, the meetings are limited to department heads only and dedicated to strategic matters. Moments like these help us stay in full sync. Regarding work processes, for instance, when we are launching a show and need to actively prepare an advertising campaign, we form a launch work group, which communicates constantly both in person and online.
About working on originals and other content
At START, we have a scheduling department. One of its key roles is to create a release schedule for the upcoming year. For example, we are currently making plans for 2024. Once the team approves the schedule, they share it with us. This gives us a more or less coherent understanding of what will be released next year. Depending on the decisions made by our executive producers and show runners, the schedule is periodically updated and aligned with the overall objectives of the entire group, since it impacts much more than just our online cinema’s interests. The revised schedule is made available in advance to all interested parties, and we plan our work accordingly.
When it becomes known within the company that the Studio is beginning to film Show N, the PR team is the first to get involved. They arrive on set and watch as we get the show on the road. Sometimes, even before that, the team will have already been gradually dropping hints to tease the press: who will be in the cast, what kind of project will be filmed, and other details. Once filming begins, the content marketing department steps in to visit the set, capture behind-the-scenes footage, conduct interviews, create a making-of movie, and collect various promotional materials. Sometimes, they may even organize an on-set photo shoot for the poster. Afterward, the project moves into production while we simultaneously start preparing for its launch. The producer duo within marketing — the people in charge of the project — reviews the content, compiles a brief, and writes descriptions in order to assign the trailer and poster design task. All of this is coordinated with the show runners. This kind of work can take about a month or a month and a half. Next, a work group is formed: an expert is chosen to represent each division (media planner, social media manager, PR specialist), and sets to work on their own part of the project corresponding to their respective stream.
Main metrics: who measures and analyzes them, how and when
Metrics may differ by department. Ultimately, they should all be aimed at increasing the number of people subscribed to our online cinema and at boosting the number of views of the title that we are launching. However, each division might have its own unique metrics. The media team has media-related metrics: the number of views, user interactions, and how many times an advertisement has been shown to different people (measured in millions). For PR, it’s all about reach and publications: the more, the better. For social media management, the metrics are the number of views for the content they post. And so on. For performance advertising, the metrics directly focus on results: clicks, visits, specific conversions into actions that users perform on our website or in our apps.
In essence, metrics like the number of views, trial sign-ups, and subscriptions to our service are shaped by how well we’ve packaged our product and prepared and developed our project promotion strategy. So, if we’ve launched a project, assembled its packaging, planned an ad campaign and other marketing activities, yet the project doesn’t meet the KPIs, we start investigating what might have gone wrong or what we might have done incorrectly. Perhaps the conversion rate on our online cinema platform is suffering due to some technical issues. If there are no such issues, we examine our tools to see what we might have done wrong, maybe detect a certain channel that isn’t functioning as planned. We also examine the media metrics of our creative materials. One way or another, this gives us an understanding of what the clickability benchmarks are. And what kind of conversions we should have. If we notice that the banner’s CTR (“click-through rate”, or clickability coefficient) is lower than usual, it indicates that we need to further investigate our creative content. Perhaps it’s not performing as well as it could, or lacks quality. At this point, we can start experimenting by trying out alternative versions of the key visual (the main advertising image). Advertising campaigns are fairly quick to demonstrate the versions’ quality. In other words, the reaction could either improve or deteriorate.
But before we create the actual advertising materials, we take several posters and, among other things, test them to ensure we’re conveying the information correctly, to see how users perceive the poster overall, and to check if they interpret the underlying message as intended. We do this with several versions.
Advertising can be either offline or online. Offline advertising includes TV, outdoor advertising, radio ads, flyers, and so forth. However, our primary focus is on digital advertising because, first and foremost, it can be measured precisely and allows for tagging to identify traffic sources and pinpoint where exactly a click occurred. Overall, we can calculate the number of impressions, reach, and clicks with quite a bit of precision. All of this can be measured, meaning that we can immediately receive feedback on how effectively our creative content is performing in digital advertising specifically. This is because we can simultaneously run two ad campaigns with different banners on the same topic. One might achieve a CTR of 1, while the other might perform twice as well. From this, we can deduce that the ad with the higher CTR is more effective and of better quality. With offline advertising (outdoor and TV), it’s not possible to receive feedback as quickly. The only way to measure its quality is by conducting preliminary testing and research.
Is it worth determining what exactly worked in the package?
Generally, it’s possible to identify which specific part of the work is better or worse. It’s done much like interface tests: which button is better, red or green? The same applies here. We can take two banners and run them concurrently, but this method allows for testing just one element. For instance, one banner shows a smiling girl, while the other doesn’t. Most likely, the banner with a smiling girl will generate more clicks. And we’ll be able to deduce what the audience responds more positively to.
There’s also an option to survey a certain control group. We can ask respondents about specific things that interest us. For example: what exactly about this creative content grabs your attention? While such questions can certainly be posed, overall we are yet to face a situation where we need to pinpoint which specific detail in the banner engages the user the most.
Staying in the loop
For all marketers, regardless of their specialization (creative, tactical, research, or analytical), it’s crucial to understand current market insights and track the popularity of a given trend. It may be an actor that people talk about, a color currently in fashion, or something else. In general, being responsive to what’s happening around you naturally enhances efficiency. Some elements work every time, like young, smiling faces on a light background. Inherently, this image will perform better than gloomy faces surrounded by dark color. However, it’s also crucial to monitor current trends: the popularity of various actors, who or what is currently talked about on social media, which issues trigger the public. This will keep you relevant and cater to the audience’s immediate needs.
START online cinema brand: how to gauge and enhance brand recognition
We got a sense of our brand’s direction about 1.5 years ago. Our team started by implementing regular brand health assessments. It’s actually what it’s called, Brand Health Tracking. The Brand Health Tracking reports evaluate how well users recognize us when asked, “Which online cinemas do you know?”. We record the responses they give off the top of their head. There’s also a metric called prompted knowledge, where the same question is asked but with multiple-choice answers. We make these reports every quarter and observe how our results evolve. The first half of the year has been quite successful for us. We’ve grown by several point fractions. What helps our brand make progress in particular are the premieres of our amazing originals, like Russian Affairs also did exceptionally well. We managed to establish good awareness of the title itself, and on top of that, it was strongly associated with our brand and contributed to making the audience more familiar with both the online cinema and START overall.
Differences between marketing for an online cinema and a TV channel or an offline movie theater
I am not too qualified to answer this question because I haven’t worked in TV channel marketing. But I’d say that it’s primarily about online content. We are digitalized to the max. For TV, the main promotion channel is its own broadcast, meaning you advertise what’s coming next right there on your channel to keep people watching further. In our case, the online environment gives users much more freedom to choose. Here, it’s both easier and more challenging to keep the consumer constantly engaged with us. The user is comfortable online because they’re not bound by broadcast schedules: they are free to watch what they want and when they want, which is a huge advantage and one of the main reasons they keep coming back to us. However, because users come to watch something specific and nothing else, our service has almost no advertising. While a TV channel promotes itself during its own broadcast, we advertise both externally and internally to ensure that users will return to us again and again. In other words, we use different tools. Television primarily advertises itself on television. We do this online. We can also self-promote in our own space, but we don’t do it as much. When you’re watching a show on TV, there will be four ad slots. We don’t have those; at most, we will play some ads after the episode ends. This isn’t as frequent as on a TV channel, so we essentially have fewer ads. Therefore, our focus should be outward, not inward, guiding the user towards our content in the evening, when they’re deciding what to watch.
About the changes in marketing
Marketing has undergone a radical transformation in the past year and a half. We’ve had to re-evaluate everything we’ve been moving towards and building over START’s six-year existence. We basically started from scratch. Reinvented ourselves, started looking for new tools. Broadly speaking, the market is still finding its footing. Advertisers’ quality has shifted, as have offline strategies. If we look at digital content, the toolkit here has undergone a colossal change, forcing us to find new approaches, methods, and sometimes even new systems of calculation. This applies to advertising opportunities overall: the players that used to offer ad spaces, like TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, as well as Google, which used to let us place ads in its search engine and across all sites in its ad network (a need now fulfilled by Yandex). Another significant segment came from YouTube advertisements, which are no longer a thing in Russia.
In the first six months following the February events and all the shutdowns, we were at a loss about how to proceed. Essentially, we had to rediscover our toolkit and find something comparable that could yield similar results for the same cost. Everyone in the market was doing that. We attempted to identify things that would work for us, areas where we could achieve similar outcomes. We spent at least half a year splitting our tools all over again in this new reality. So, marketing is perpetually evolving at a rapid pace.
What are the strengths of START’s marketing?
The START marketing team is quite large, particularly in terms of its creative component, which is essentially what allows us to achieve exceptional results. No third-party contractor can truly understand our projects, actually live through them, the way we do. This very approach, combined with our experience and knowledge, helps us to create posters and trailers at a unique quality level that only START is capable of. But this kind of engagement in the process isn’t exclusive to people working on creative content, SMM, Media, or performance: everyone is extremely involved and passionate and cares deeply about the outcome beyond just numbers and KPIs. For us, each advertising campaign is a significant event, a cherished brainchild, with no two campaigns ever being alike. In essence, the key to our success is our comprehensive, fully in-house expertise 🙂
