Take a quick scroll through your Facebook and Twitter feed, and you’ll likely come across a movie trailer. These days there are entire YouTube accounts exclusively publishing trailers, and entertainment and news sites often publish stories dedicated to the announcement of a film preview.
In this new era of ubiquitous trailers, it’s hard to remember an online marketing ecosystem without film promotion. It was just a few short years ago, though, that you had to be in a movie theatre to see a full-length trailer. As Focus Features social media director Lauren Jacob remembers the start of her career in 2009, digital and social media promotion were at the bottom of the film industry’s priority list.
“I’ll never forget when I started, we had a Facebook page, and there [were] debates,” Jacob recalls of social media discussions during her early days in the movie business at Alliance Films (since folded into Entertainment One).
“You can only promote one movie at one time on Facebook and Twitter, you can’t promote more than two. This was honestly what our agency was telling us,” she says. “It was just so archaic. It was crazy.”
As a 23-year-old tuned into online conversations about movies (from social media to Rotten Tomatoes) she noticed that other film companies were adapting their digital and social strategies a lot faster than Alliance was. While her career had only just started, she asked her boss if she could look into getting better social media advice and conducted an RFP for a new agency. By the time Jacob left Alliance four years later, she had established herself as the company’s digital media director, handling the social media promotion for major Canadian film releases including The Hunger Games in 2012.
“Lauren came to me and she basically started a digital department at Alliance Films,” says Frank Mendicino, senior vice-president of marketing at Entertainment One. “She was smart enough to see the need, and she went for it and built her own department.”
Jacob makes a habit of being at the forefront of digital promotion and content in the entertainment industry. Having made her digital mark at Alliance, she left in 2013 to work on the secret Project Gladiator at Rogers Media, which turned out to be the launch of video streaming service (and Netflix competitor) Shomi.
“Being very passionate about entertainment, I wanted to work on a brand that was going to represent the future of the business,” says Jacob.
Her work ended up touching several key elements of the Shomi launch, from developing the customer lifecycle, conducting a sizeable media buy for the product’s introductory campaign, and working with agency BBDO Proximity on the service’s creative and tagline: “Shomi [insert word/phrase here].”
“The biggest challenge of launching Shomi was we had to build a brand, introduce Canada to a brand that they’ve never heard about before,” says Jacob.
“We had to differentiate ourselves against Netflix… Not just be a ‘me too’ brand.”
Jacob’s media buy certainly helped Shomi get off on the right foot. Facebook cites Shomi’s launch as a business success case study, noting that the ads bought for the product on the social media site reached 10 million people, with a 63% brand awareness rate (the goal was 40%). The Facebook buy alone generated 84,000 leads. While she can’t disclose exact subscription targets, Jacob says Shomi saw more than double the amount of subscriptions than what was expected in its first three months of operation. Better yet, 60% of those subscriptions can be attributed to the digital marketing campaigns she oversaw.
With the launch of a brand new entertainment product under her belt, Jacob, now 29, has recently landed back on the studio side of the film industry. In August she moved to Los Angeles to be the social media director for Focus Features, a division of NBCUniversal. Part of her orientation included spending a day on the famed Universal Hollywood backlot.
An even better perk of the job is getting to be on the side of the U.S.-Canada border that makes many of the decisions for film marketing campaigns.
“I always wanted to be on the other end of the phone, now it’s weird that I am,” says Jacob. In L.A., “we’re the ones developing the plans from the ground up… Building the social media plans right from the beginning, working with the filmmakers, working with the big giants out here, like Facebook, Google and Twitter. It’s pretty surreal.”
She hasn’t left the Canadian film industry behind completely, though. Jacob recently headed back to Toronto for TIFF, to assist with the premiere of Focus Features’ The Danish Girl, starring Academy and Golden Globe Award winner Eddie Redmayne. Jacob will be in charge of the movie’s Oscar campaign this fall.
If she ever decides to head home again permanently, she’ll be welcomed with open arms.
“I miss her terribly,” says Alliance’s Mendicino. “She’s the smartest person I’ve ever met… an exceptional, talented individual who will go very far.”
