What can your theatre company steal from Sainsbury’s £7m Christmas advertising campaign?
Tonight during Corrie Sainsbury’s premiered an abridged version of the two-minute, school-Christmas-show-themed advert at the heart of their £7m Christmas advertising campaign.
Sainsbury’s — according to a Guardian news story which raises a quizzical eyebrow at similarities between this and a September Waitrose & Partners advert that also features a school play — have apparently been working with The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey on the ad since January.
Now that Halloween is safely out the way and there’s no Thanksgiving to protect the British public, all advertising spend turns to Christmas.
So what sprung out when looking at this feast of over-the-top Yuletide festivity, apart from wondering what would have happened if my school Christmas show had enjoyed the same budget and handheld camera skills? For me, two things:
1. Create original content, then promote it properly
Sainbury’s haven’t just created an advert that’ll run 30 or 60 seconds and fade into the distance ready for the next segment of everyone’s favourite soap to come back on. They’ve created artistic, well thought through, beautifully filmed content which they are hoping people are going to seek out and watch in its own right.
I think they’ve succeeded, it’s a great two-minute short film which captures the excitement of a school Christmas show and then blows all expectations out of the water. It’s really good fun and Christmas without being too Christmassy for a mild and rainy 12 November.
I went back to the Guardian website to find the article I’d read earlier in the day about how much they’d spent and the Waitrose similarities, and found that Sainbury’s were running banner ads above the Guardian’s masthead promoting their Christmas advert and directing clicks to their YouTube channel.
That’ll be their beautifully organised and curated YouTube channel with their previous Christmas adverts all using custom thumbnails and running down the sidebar like a greatest hits of their previous festive output.
The fact that this advert was dropping during Coronation Street and had been directed by the same guy who did The Greatest Showman wasn’t a surprise to the Great British Public — Sainsbury’s press released all of the details on Friday, three days before the TV debut and the midnight YouTube release, including seeding the YouTube video links so that anyone writing about it could make sure it was embedded in the story and including plenty of quotes from those involved who want their names in lights.
I’m sure the PR didn’t expect to see it written up by the Guardian with a “look how unoriginal this Christmas ad is” angle, but the video got covered and the video was embedded none the less! You can read the Sainsbury’s press release on their digital newsroom. It’s a strong example of the form, clearly formatted, lots of detail, follows the old inverted Christmas tree metaphor. Seasonal.
Doing a bit more research before posting this, it looks like on Monday night Sainbury’s have also promoted the #SainsburysXmasAd hashtag on Twitter.
I started writing this at about 9pm and am posting around midnight. The advert (let’s remember it’s an advert that everyone is now going to YouTube and choosing to watch) debuted on TV in an advert break during Coronation Street at 7pm which I read gets around 6 million viewers.
When I started writing this blog Sainbury’s had paid, promoted, or otherwise motivated 600,000 other people to view their advert on YouTube. They’ve just crossed the 1 million views mark as I type.
The arts marketing takeaway
If you go to the bother and spend the time and budget to create content like a show trailer or a video for a song in your show then make sure that you put the leg work in to promote it and get people to watch it.
If you spend money creating a trailer then every time you’re promoting your show make sure that the trailer is front and centre. If you’ve done your job properly then it should absolutely be the strongest tool you’ve got for conveying your work and selling tickets to your show.
If you’re touring make sure that every venue website has got your trailer embedded. The trailer should absolutely be embedded on your own website pride of place.
Make sure that the video is hosted on your YouTube account, don’t cross or double-post it — it’s not just about only having one place that you’re clocking up vanity viewing figures, if it’s your YouTube channel then it’s your YouTube analytics that are capturing views and viewer information. Those will tell you what’s going on with your video, what promotion is working and who is working.
That might mean that you have to be clever about the call to action in your video — if you’re touring there might be a temptation to put a different version with a tailored call to action with each venue and seed it through their channels, but I’d suggest that a single, strong web address on a closing slate and a link in the YouTube description should be enough and give you a single click through metric to track.
If you’re sending out emails to your list or your venue has got a mailing list they have permission to contact marketing upcoming shows, make sure the video is being used to promote the show.
Remember, even under GDPR, if a customer has purchased a product once and not opted out of email communications then they can be contacted with information regarding further items to purchase.
As video doesn’t play natively in most email clients best practice is to put the video thumbnail image in the body of the email with a play button super imposed in an image editor.
Link them through to your website with the YouTube video embedded. That gives them a destination to watch with a clear path to purchasing tickets.
With regards to the Sainsbury’s press release — chances are filming a trailer for your upcoming show in itself isn’t strong enough news to be picked up from a press release, but if you’ve got a trailer filmed by the time that you’re first announcing the show, forming part of a season being announced or if it’s in time for big casting news that you think might get picked up, make sure it’s mentioned in the body of the release and properly linked!
The exception that might prove the rule on trailers themselves not being newsworthy would be if you’ve created a video that’s so strong its viral in its own right, or if you’re targeting press that’s so local or in need of content that the novelty of having a video to promote a show will get you a story.
Think small village or really local paper website, in which case it becomes an additional opportunity to promote the show between an initial announcement and any other news hook you might have.
Even if you’re not Sainsbury’s and you don’t see yourself landing the front page of a national newspaper for your show trailer being release, at least give some thought about when you are going to announce your news.
If you want information to make it into the print edition of The Stage they need it on a Tuesday each week for the Thursday paper. A Thursday night is when Baz runs his entertainment column online in the Daily Mail so it goes out in the Friday print edition. That often blows smaller stories out of the water in the theatre press on a Friday morning as PRs get their “official” press releases out and their tickets on sale.
Note to self — write another blog post about show video trailers, what they can and should be and how to promote them.
2. Create great content, then use it to create more and more and more content
Looking in the description of Sainbury’s YouTube video it’s not just a link through to the Sainbury’s website to get you to spend money with them — that’s pretty far down actually — there’s a couple of interesting further content links. Creating one high quality piece of content begets more opportunities to promote and engage.
Sainbury’s first link is to a three-minute “making of” video focusing on the 60 kids that star in their advert. So far, so normal. If you’ve got the budget to get The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey to direct your Christmas ad you’ve got the budget to get someone to film you filming your film.
The second link in their YouTube video description is to a Spotify playlist of the song that’s in the advert.
The thing that sparked me writing this entire blog post to begin with was looking through the Twitter responses that Sainsbury’s was getting when they’d first started promoting their Chistmas ad on Twitter.
Sainbury’s do a solid job of having a real person with a real personality at the end of their stream, clocking on and clocking off at the beginning and end of their shifts.
When it came to the launch of their Christmas advert their social team had been primed and took their prepared content to another level — their own animated GIFs, taken from the wider video.
Now when Sainbury’s are replying to tweets they’re giving personalised responses to customers with additional content that both reinforces the overall campaign and gives a really novel GIF, by repurposing content already created for their overall video.
The arts marketing takeaway
You don’t have to film a “making of” featurette for the day you spent filming your show trailer, but I bet the process of making it will throw up ample opportunities for some behind the scenes photos that will make good Instagram content.
The process of deciding how to convey your show on film rather than stage could be a topic that’s worth blogging about. If you’re working with creatives you wouldn’t normally, whether film directors or video editors then think about how working with them will give opportunities for additional content. Chances are inviting them to interact with your work will throw up some really interesting perspectives on it.
The important thing is that someone is thinking about the content that can be created from your activities, planning them in advance and then looking for distribution once they’ve been created.
If you’ve gone to the incredible effort of professional recording and mastering audio, particularly if you’re the originator of the content and there are no rights issues, then get it out there on all of the channels you can.
The channels you’re using to distribute audio are likely going to be different to video — probably Soundcloud rather than YouTube — but you can also stick an image as the placeholder for a video or create a lyrics video and all of a sudden you’ve got valuable YouTube content there too.
Create great content and it will help you create more and more great content. Every time you’re creating content for social channels, long form or short form, think of how it can be used in a different context. Theatre makers are amazing storytellers, follow that impetus in the content that you’re creating.
Filming a dance rehearsal? How many of those steps could be taken, albeit with a bit of video editing work, and turned into animated GIFs that you could be using on other channels?
Not everything has to be a hilarious cat video animated GIF, it could just be that isolating a step or a lighting change will give you something that stands alone, genuinely represents, you but is compelling.
Think about the media you’re using to respond to people on social media. It doesn’t have to be a specially created animated GIF that’s been taken from your own videos.
Give some thought to varying impersonal but much appreciated Twitter “likes” with personal text responses that acknowledge who is reading your inbound social mentions. Perhaps your artistic director reads every Tweet but never publicly responds — change that! Throw in the occasional animated GIF or an emoji if it’s appropriate.
What’s coming to help with this in Scottie
In Scottie we’re going to build tools that don’t just pull in your entire Twitter or Facebook stream but let you curate social content into beautifully crafted pages that are destinations in their own right.
Every day that you’re working on a production you, your cast and crew, your venues are creating social media content around your work. That content doesn’t have to remain siloed on individual social channels, but instead can be pulled together into pages that help you tell the story of how your work was originated, rehearsed, presented and received.
We want to make it easy to find those relevant social media posts, curate them, annotate them to give them context and present them responsively for others to read.
The process of pulling this content together should provide a promotional platform for your social channels — I’m on your website, now I’m following you on Instagram — but should also provide you with content that can be shared on those channels — on our website there’s a curated gallery of 12 rehearsal shots from different cast member’s Instagram feeds, now being shared on the company Twitter feed.
The same tools that allow you to create social pages from content created by your cast and crew can also be used to provide social validation to your shows, pulling together audience feedback on social media into a single destination page that can be shared with potential audiences.
Lots more to come. To stay connected with us and everything that we’re building visit Scottie.io.
