Above The Best
Feature film release
Above the Best is based on the #1 Best Selling book South of Heaven using the real footage to create an unprecedented immersive documentary-narrative film. The film tells the story of Apache Pilot Dan Flores and his year deployment to the most dangerous valley in Afghanistan. A stunning, eye-popping glimpse into the life of an Apache pilot during his year in the Hindu Kush Mountains and the Korengal Valley. See why Army Aviators say they fly “above the best” and the lengths these folks will go to protect each other in the most dangerous place on Earth.
The Challenge
The challenge of every new film release is to generate as much return as possible. With smaller independent films it might seem like a challenge to generate good numbers but with the same resources and media spend as the big Hollywood studios, smaller films can gain momentum. With a strong message and target demographic, the team needed to gain interest and engagement from their supports as well as gain new audience awareness. The VOD campaign relied on grassroots for aligned organization support, social awareness, and assets that would help drive up sales in such a short amount of time.
our solutions
Our solution was to create a full-scale marketing strategy and road-map. After identifying proper target audiences and aligned organizations to our cause, determining media spend, optimizing deployment, creating content, and growing awareness and engagement through a variety of creative marketing campaigns. Our ability to leverage organic grassroots amplification for all these tactics was crucial in generating word-of-mouth buzz as well as leveraging third-party support on aligned social platforms and community forums.
Web design copy — First step for the audience begins with creating a custom website that is utilized to drive traffic and all marketing efforts. An inviting, sleek, and engaging design mixed with informational content allows the site to be user friendly and entertaining.
First step for the audience begins with creating a custom website that is utilized to drive traffic and all marketing efforts. An inviting, sleek, and engaging design mixed with informational content allows the site to be user friendly and entertaining. Visit the site here: abovethebestfilm.com
A hyper-targeted social media strategy was created to give highlight to any assets, events, and promos that would drive up sales and engagement, via Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Custom social assets generated awareness as did grassroots efforts. From vets, new media sources, museums, patriotic fan bases, and other aligned foundations, we can use audience engagement to leverage paid media efforts and social media marketing campaigns.
To leverage audience engagement paid media spend continuously grows overall sales and traction for key content. Utilizing any video content, trailers, posters, key imagery, etc. to drive traffic while still providing entertaining and engaging content for the audience. Using a custom dashboard for data analyzing and progress allows the paid media to be interrupted so we know how we can continue to grow the awareness efforts.
the results
Given the smaller advertising budget on this project, we chose to focus our efforts primarily on Facebook, which we’ve seen the best results from, on other campaigns. The focus was first to increase the followers on the Above The Best Facebook page. And the other was to drive traffic to the specific SVOD platforms. We were pleased to see our efforts reach over 1MM people, with the trailer seeing 1.25MM plays, over 100,000 clicks, and a consistent CTR above 5%. CPM’s were much lower than comparable campaigns, averaging roughly 6%, with almost 60K clicks to the respective SVOD platforms. In it’s first week of release, the film made the iTunes 10 Documentaries, and stayed there for quite some time.
SUMMARY
‘Above the Best’ was released on VOD July of 2019. We were pleased to see that throughout the campaign there was massive cross-promotion gross. Total impressions between all platforms increased to more than 2.3 million. Total engagements grew 1,100% and website clicks increased to 60.3k total. As a result of growing the films Facebook audience first then driving pre-sales, flash sales and day of release blast we were able to have success with paid media efforts. Following the traction from paid media, social media and grassroots efforts solidified the films awareness with the audience and drove traffic to the website and sales. The film continues to inspire and entertain audiences everywhere.
