mercredi 3 septembre 2014

Secret Cinema: Lessons to Take Back to the Future

Secret Cinema: Lessons to Take Back to the Future image secret cinema social mediaMy favourite film of all time is the Robert Zemeckis classic Back To The Future. In my opinion it’s one of – if not the – best time-travelling action adventure comedy movies in history. I’m sure you can imagine my excitement when interactive movie experience company Secret Cinema announced that Back To The Future would be the focus of its latest extravaganza. I was very excited.


As a bit of background, Secret Cinema is an immersive film company that creates audience experiences based on popular movies. In recent years the company presented The Shawshank Redemption in a Hackney school, Bugsy Malone in the intricately re-purposed Troxy venue in Shoreditch and Blade Runner in London’s Wood Wharf.


They are huge productions incorporating a full cast of actors, technical direction and special effects. The recent Back To The Future event is its most adventurous undertaking to date and required an incredible amount of planning, not just in how to actually stage the event but how the marketing effort would support it and plant the seed in the loyal fan base.


Secret Cinema’s social media strategy


In this article, I’d like to focus on Secret Cinema’s social strategy for the Back To The Future event and how it supported the wider online and offline marketing, which I found very interesting. Secret Cinema’s tag line is “tell no one”, which immediately portrays the company as a personal, private club for “those in the know”. I like that a lot but how do you market to people without telling anyone anything?


All you need to do is connect with one person on an emotional level. Easy. How did Secret Cinema do this?


With this tweet:




Followed by…




Before finally announcing that Hill Valley was coming to London…




Those simple messages sparked the imaginations of thousands of movie fans. Tickets for all events sold out almost immediately upon release.


In the lead up to the event, the engagement ramped up as the Hill Valley Facebook community started pulling in the ticket holders by creating events to happenings like the Enchantment Under The Sea Dance, Re-elect Mayor Red Thomas (all great references from the film if you haven’t seen it) and encouraging members to share their given Hill Valley profiles and start chatting with each other.


When you bought a ticket you were given a character to play along with business cards, Californian Hill Valley IDs and even a phone number! This was almost too much to take in, but the attention to detail and sheer scale of what this event hoped to achieve kept people involved.


Then disaster




No explanation, no reasons, just a cancellation notice and an email address. Hearts sank, tempers rose and Twitter suddenly became a hot-bed of rumours and disappointment.


Now this is where social media ‘rules of complaint engagement 101’ should be employed – never leave a complaint hanging and be transparent with any wider problems.


Anyone that replied to this tweet was informed that they will be sent an email. In an hour or so all the major news sites picked up that something big was happening and they started covering the story. This obviously fuelled the rumour fire by publishing some of the more heart-wrenching tweets of disappointment.


Eventually, the ’problems’ were fixed and the event launched to incredible reviews. I don’t want to slam Secret Cinema here, what they have achieved is nothing short of mind blowing but the more adventurous and grand the production, the more detailed and well thought-out the PR contingency must be.


Rumours for why the initial week of shows were cancelled are much more damaging than facing up to the true reasons and telling the fans.


With productions as large and as adventurous as this, things will go wrong and, obviously, you can’t predict every error but how you deal with them is paramount. With the huge social following that Secret Cinema attracted for Back To The Future, all eyes were on them leading up to the event. The question everyone wanted answering was, “Why?” – an answer Secret Cinema was not willing to give at that time.


If the fault was with the production itself, be honest. You will still receive negative responses but the brand-damaging rumours would have been quelled.


As my mum always told me, “honesty is the best policy”.


But as Doc Brown told me, “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads” – but that was a different conversation.






Secret Cinema: Lessons to Take Back to the Future
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