To help grow awareness of Academy Award winning director Danny Boyle's film Trance prior to release in theaters, Fox Searchlight contacted my team at TVGla to create a disruptive and low-cost experience online. With very tight budget restrictions for developing the digital awareness campaign, I decided to research what the conversation online was like surrounding the director in hopes of finding an existing platform with a large user base and a positive view of his work.
As a regular user of Reddit, I quickly discovered that an AMA request for Danny Boyle had been put up on the site some months prior to receiving the RFP for the job. The genuine interest in having Danny speak about his work on a free platform with millions of daily users made perfect sense. But it wasn't that easy.
Understanding the expected decorum and code of conduct on Reddit is crucial to finding success when sharing ideas, especially when those ideas are about something you are selling. Actor and director Woody Harrelson famously ignored these rules and expectations when infamously bombing an AMA. Because he ignored the questions presnted by Redditors and only talked about his film, Harrelson was blasted online. The internet responded by quickly making a meme (see picture above) focused on the failed AMA. This in turn went viral and the movie tanked. So, convincing studio executives and a highly successful director to walk this line was no easy task.
To help convince Danny and the executives that this unorthodox approach could be successful despite examples like Woody Harrelson's fumble, I created a best practices guide, walking both groups through not only the history of Reddit, but the codes of conduct and expectations for the site and the AmA subbreddit. The strong subscriber base to the IAmA subbreddit combined with the compelling explanantions in the best practices presentation compelled both parties to go along with my suggestion.
To help drive users to the AMA, we also put a call out for it on the film's site integrated into the experience. The site was initially going to be extremeely basic, but Danny's enthusiasm about the Reddit campaign and our recommendations enabled us to make the experience far more robust and immersive. I talk about the creation of that film site and the strategy behind its design here https://www.behance.net/gallery/Trance-Film-Site/13553691
The AMA was a huge success success, garnering so many upvotes and views that the experience was pushed to the front page of Reddit throughout the day. For several hours it sat as the number 2 link on the site's landing page, garnering millions of impressions at no cost to Fox. At the time of posting this, the AMA has over 11,000 upvotes and is shortlisted in the top 100 AMAs ever conducted.
Danny was extremely happy with the results of the experience and asked that in turn the studio push the development of the film's site further, allowing my team to create a highly cerebral and thought provoking web experience that would later win the FWA Site of the Day.
The succus of the AMA was picked up by various press groups including lifestyle magazine BlackBook.
