A Gruvi Case Study – Shark Week

In today’s blog we’re looking at a social media marketing case study, featuring our work with CinEvents on the show Shark Week:

The Challenge
Gruvi was tasked by CinEvents to help attract typical TV audiences for Shark Week into cinemas for an event experience. The screenings of Shark Week ran for 5 days (18- 22 July) in selected cinemas across UK and Ireland, immediately prior to the show’s premiere on Discovery Channel on the 23rd of July.
The marketing campaign first required identifying, reaching, and engaging the target audience for the TV show. Then we were tasked with persuading them to watch the content in a cinema instead of their own home, enjoying the benefit of an enhanced picture and sound experience.

Insight
Testing on social media started 2 weeks before the premiere of Shark Week in cinemas, evaluating the hypothesis that the typical audience for the TV show would be interested in the event cinema experience. The assumption was also that the core audience would be predominantly male.
We tested keywords such as sharks, Shark Week, Discovery channel, Jaws and focused primarily on male audiences in cities across the UK and Ireland where the event was going to take place. Nature documentary fans were also targeted, as were frequent watchers of channels similar to Discovery (e.g. National Geographic). These campaigns were then optimised for video views across YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.
Testing revealed that while a male audience was easier to reach and engage with watching the video, in two main age brackets (18-24 and 25-34) the content also resonated significantly with female users.

Combining the results of testing and the input from other partners in the project we identified additional interests, such as water parks. The testing phase helped build awareness for the event in addition to providing valuable insight.

Solution
The campaign was optimised for driving click-throughs to the client’s landing page, which incorporated a session finder and ticket booking function. The location targeting was narrowed down to a radius around the specific participating cinemas in the UK and Ireland (postcode based). Ads ran for a week prior to the premiere on July 18 and continued for the whole duration of the event.
In addition to YouTube and Facebook, the main campaign included not just in-feed advertising on Instagram, but also Stories. This format was employed here specifically to better reach users between 18 and 34 years old (the most engaged demographic segment).

The effective strategies included: focusing on large urban areas, highlighting the uniqueness of the experience and providing engaging advertising experiences across the channels where the target audience was most active.
The Results

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