Dive Brief:
- In the run-up to Friday’s official release, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" has dominated movie chatter accounting for almost 92% of total conversation volume compared to five major releases.
- The data, produced by Salesforce Marketing Cloud's Social Studio, shows the highly-anticipated film was mentioned 992.1% more often than the other top five December movies.
- A strong majority (93.6%) of the mentions happened on Twitter, and there were 10,300 mentions on the film’s seven brand partners, which saw 396 million Twitter impressions on those mentions.
Dive Insight:
According to iSpot.tv, 19 brands have been running Star Wars-themed ads and have spent almost $60 million as of Dec. 14.
Salesforce's Social Studio decided to look into the social media impact of the film after finding out that Disney was planning on cutting back on advertising ahead of the movie's release. The Social Studio's research looked at five of the most-anticipated December movies: Star Wars, Krampus, The Hateful Eight, The Big Short and In the Heart of the Sea. Star Wars completely overshadowed the other four on social media, particularly on Twitter.
The conversation about the movie also had legs for its seven brand partners: Verizon, Cover Girl, HP, Subway, Fiat Chrysler, Duracell and General Mills.
From a Salesforce post on Medium, “Walt Disney Co.’s decision to reduce ad spend may not have a detrimental impact on 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' due to the influence of social media. Campaigns such as Verizon’s #TheoryWars engages fans in a way traditional advertising never could. When comparing the top Star Wars hashtags, #TheoryWars accounted for 5.1K mentions. The Star Wars fan community has found its voice through social and is a key force in promoting the film, underscoring the impact social channels now play."
The movie also received promotions on ESPN and ABC, both Disney properties. That ESPN grabbed 60% of the mentions compared to ABC shows how Star Wars has cultivated broad consumer and marketer appeal in recent years.
Further, the Salesforce post points out, that now a greater variety of brands can get in on the conversation. "Verizon’s campaign shows that there are opportunities for brands to be a genuine part of the conversation on social rather than just broadcast their own narrative," the post's author wrote.
