THE OPPORTUNITY
One Week represented the biggest marketing push in Mongrel Media’s history. It is no secret that Canadian-based films have box office challenges, so Mongrel wanted to “make a splash” without losing the traditional movie site appeal.
THE CHALLENGE
Create an online experience that mixed classic movie site with social media to increase awareness and drive people to the theatres.
THE ASK
• Brand Strategy
• Information Architecture
• Conceptual Design
• Template Design
• UGC Integration (Media Factory)
• Social Media sharing (Facebook, Twitter, Delicio.us, Digg)
• Copy Writing
• Page Production
• Flash Animation
• Analytic Integration
THE RESULTS
70 Main Street created a website that looked and felt like the movie and allowed the visitor to engage with the movie on a meaningful level. In case you haven’t seen it, One Week is about a guy from Toronto (Joshua Jackson) who discovers he has terminal cancer and has one week before entering chemo, which may or may not save his life. The prospect of having one week to live compels him to impulsively buy a second-hand motorcycle and head west across Canada. In watching the movie, two themes resonate:
- What would you do if you had one week to live?
- Canada is an amazing country
It was important to us that we didn’t create a social media component just for social media’s sake – it had to complement the film’s tone and meaning. After viewing through the “social media eye” we decided to create three social media components:
- Photo contest with prizing: Show Us the Best Place in Canada to Spend One Week. Participants were invited to upload photos or videos and to mark the location of the photo on a map of Canada (using the Google Maps API). We liked this ideas because:
- It related well to the film’s plot and its tribute to Canada
- The media required to participate was easily accessible (i.e. everybody’s got vacation photos)
- The client and 70 Main Street were pleased to see such a terrific participation level and were amazed at the lengthy descriptions that participants offered to explain their pictures. It was obvious that participants were fully invested in the theme of the contest and, by extension, the theme of the movie.
- Twitter-esque “what would you do” module: we asked the audience a simple question: “What would you do if you had one week to live?” and the module enabled them to answer it quickly (without the signup process related to the contest). This enabled people to participate (and emotionally invest) in the film’s central theme without spending a lot of time.
- Blog: We enabled site visitors to submit questions to the director (Michael McGowen) and to the film’s leading actor (Joshua Jackson) .
Naturally, the site also included “movie-site musts” such as trailers, cast bios, soundtrack, synopsis etc.
The website garnered incredible response for a Canadian movie. The contest received over 1500 submissions and the “what would you do” module received over 4,700 submissions. Most importantly, the website helped propel One Week to solid box office numbers.
