Case Study: How Private Marketplaces Based On Emotions Lead to Movie Success

While people eagerly await the 89th Academy Awards, Unruly takes a look at how studios can use private marketplaces to make their movies a smash-hit

Despite the Oscars celebrating the best of the best on the silver screen, our data has shown that movie trailers don’t always connect with viewers or drive big box office success.

So what can studios do to attract more buzz around their movie trailers? We’ve been working with a major movie studio to bring emotional intelligence to their video campaigns through our Emotional PMPs, which were launched in September.

Not familiar with Emotional PMPs?

Emotional PMPs are a series of curated private marketplaces that helps marketers match their ads with the mood of the environment or website it appears on.

As our EVP of Global Business Development recently told MediaPost, “we have identified the emotions that people are feeling from the content they’re reading and engaging with. They may over-index on happiness, for example. Then we look at all the other sites that over-index on happiness and package those for advertisers.”

Got it. So what were the results?

This particular movie studio’s goal was to programmatically reach viewers likely to emotionally engage with a heart-wrenching trailer for one of its Thanksgiving movie releases. We launched the campaign using our nostalgic UnrulyX Emotional PMP in addition to a PMP curated to reach movie fans to amplify viewer response to the trailer.

By launching through both the Movie PMP and Nostalgia Emotional PMP, the movie studio’s campaign outperformed benchmarks by more than 168%. Both PMPs far surpassed the industry average for skippable video completion rates.

When it comes to viewability, our campaigns also exceeded the Moat benchmark by 32%. This is due to the fact that UnrulyX formats are viewability-initiated and exceed Moat’s benchmarks for MRC viewability by 19%.

Curious how an Emotional PMP might be able to amplify your video campaign? Give us a buzz!