Armstrong
Feature film release
ARMSTRONG is a dramatic and emotional documentary that features never-before-seen family home-movie footage, along with still and moving images that chronicle Neil Armstrong’s incredible life. With the support of the Armstrong family the film details his near-death experiences as a fighter pilot in Korea, his test pilot days, Gemini 8 and Apollo 11 missions, and the challenges that followed his extraordinary fame.
The Challenge
The challenge of every new film release is to generate as much return as possible. That can be difficult with smaller independent films. But they can gain success with the right resources, marketing tactics, and media spend. That’s where Vanquish comes into the picture. Armstrong was set to release roughly a week before the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. We aimed to maximize audience engagement, social reach, and sales while targeting space enthusiasts, families, as well as the space community, celebrating the historic anniversary, without being washed out by other similar films. The campaign was broken down into three phases; Awareness, Pre-sale, and VOD, along with theatrical and flash sale.
our solutions
Our solution was to create a full-scale creative marketing strategy and road-map. By identifying proper target audiences and aligned organizations, narrowing down media spend, optimizing engagement, creating content, and growing awareness we were able to create a successful marketing campaign. This included the design and deployment of a custom website, new social media channels, and a grassroots outreach program geared at engaging influencers within the space community.
Audience awareness begins with a custom website, designed to gain engagement driven by various marketing efforts. While maintaining a sleek and user friendly design. The key points of the site are informational, mixed with media, press, ticket links, theater listings, and any other assets that drive up theatrical or VOD sales.
For social, we created a hyper-targeted strategy, created to identify and engage audiences on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with a particular set of interests and behaviors. From astronauts, students, patriotic fan bases, museums and other aligned foundations, we used audience engagement to leverage paid media efforts and social media marketing campaigns.
A variety of content was created to leverage audience engagement. By using GIFs, cinemagraphs, teasers, trailers, posters, giveaway campaigns, memes, etc. we were about to drive release awareness and sales. Custom assets were also created for influencers, cast/crew, and affiliated organizations who supported the cause and wanted to cross promote the film.
the results
Armstrong was released theatrically in select cities as well as released on VOD July 12, 2019. We were pleased to see massive cross-platform growth at a continuous rate. Total impressions between all platforms increased to more than 7.5 million at a 1.792% increase from the start of the campaign. Total engagements grew 463% and website clicks increased to 122.9k total. As a result of our marketing efforts the film made it number one on iTunes top 100 documentaries, the week of release. By engaging aligned organizations, bloggers, influencers, and other grassroots connections, the film had a cumulative reach of over 570k organically. The film continues to enjoy tremendous social engagement and will continue to be an inspirational documentary leaving a lasting impact.
SUMMARY
The “Armstrong” documentary marketing campaign was a huge success. Especially when there were 4 other very similar films available at the same time. By utilizing our core three delivery principles (Awareness, Engagement, & Activation) we were able to successfully sheppard this film into market, setting it up for success for years to come.
