Broadcast Film Critics Association

Stradella Road was engaged for marketing support by the Broadcast Film Critics Association (BFCA) for their annual Critics’ Choice Movie Awards on VH1. The BFCA had dual goals for the campaign: Driving awareness and capturing the attention of a younger audience. This raised a larger issue, as our MovieGoers 2010 study showed that the influence of professional critics on moviegoers has become less relevant than aggregated consumer sentiment, particularly among the younger consumer set.

The unique thing about the BFCA is that many members attend movie studio press junkets each week where they interview celebrities about upcoming releases. This gives these members personal insight into stars that consumers find highly engaging. Our recommendation was to employ social media to support BFCA members by activating individual critics and expanding their social profile through sharing celebrity anecdotes and film news.

At the start of the campaign, the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards level of awareness was essentially zero across social media platforms. Stradella Road assisted in generating an increase of 32% in the number people following BFCA members on social media venues like Twitter and Facebook. By the time of the awards show, awareness was at 76% across microblogs (Twitter, Tumblr, etc.), our primary focus, and coordinated messaging from the BFCA membership served as an effective marketing platform for the awards show.

Beyond the awards push, BFCA members continue to be active in social media, driving personal relevance and connecting them to a younger audience than they were reaching via traditional media channels.

“At the BFCA, our goal was to support our membership in staying relevant to consumers as they lead increasingly digital lives. Stradella Road supplied innovation and insight in delivering both short- and long-term strategies for us. They empowered the individual media professionals in our membership with social media prowess and the ability to pull work from multiple mediums into a timed social media distribution campaign that supported our annual Critics’ Choice Movie Awards program. The strategy assisted in increasing TV viewership of the awards by 39%. More importantly, it has given our 235 members a sustainable platform for relevance in digital media, helping them to drive awareness and syndication for their professional work,” said Joey Berlin, president of the BFCA.