About Happy New Year by Red Chillies
Happy New Year is an action comedy film directed by Farah Khan and produced by Gauri Khan under the banner of Red Chillies Entertainment. Red Chillies Entertainment is an Indian motion picture production and distribution company, based in Mumbai. The film was released on Diwali, 24 October 2014 in 3 different languages : Hindi, Tamil and Telegu. With around 500 screens, Happy New year was the biggest release for a Hindi Film in India.
Background
Happy new year movie starring Sha Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone tells the story of a team of losers in their quest to pull off the biggest diamond heist. Movie had everything that audience love : superstars, dance, music and action. The challenge was to reach out to the target audience. Understanding the potential of Digital space they decided to reached out to their audience through an integrated digital marketing approach.
Objectives
Reaching out to maximum number of people and creating a great hype with the pre-release promotional campaigns was essential for a box office hit. As the chances are less likely for a repeat business for the same movie, record collection on the first week itself was the main objective of the marketing team.
Strategy Adopted
HNY took the Integrated marketing approach to reach out to the audience. They knew social platforms were the fitting medium to sway the target audience. The campaigns were designed in such a way that the audience itself became the advocates of the movie. The aim was to reach the audience at a personal level and engage with them for high market penetration.
Movie started its campaign around the new year time, where fans could directly tweet new year wishes to their favorite stars to get a surprise gift. Campaign spread like fire when fans started getting autographed first look poster with personalized message from the stars.
Cast changed their names to their Character name and started tweeting trailers to fans individually. The response from Twitter was huge. The result was that, the trailer got 1 million views in one day. #HNYposter & #HappyNewYear were some of the trending hashtags during the campaign.
To reach out to their Facebook fans the movie created an app in partnership with Facebook, where fans could request for the trailer and it will show up on their timeline.The movie trailer went viral in just 24 hours and set global records.
The movie made sure it leveraged all the platforms including WhatsApp. HNY was the first movie ever to release their trailer through WhatsApp. The total reach of the trailer through WhatsApp was around 0.1 million.
Other Platforms
- The movie tied up with Tata sky dth providers and other telecom operators to post the trailers on their websites.
- They also released an official mobile game based on the movie, where users could use their mobile phones as motion sensing remotes.
Results Achieved
- The overall reach of the trailer was 70 million in just 24 hours.
- 1978 million impressions on twitter.
- Happy New Year set a record by collecting around 450 million, making it the first Bollywood film to reach the figure for a single day.
- This was also the first movie cast to be invited to Twitter and Facebook.
Learning
Although the film received negative reviews from critics it was a commercial success and ranks among the highest-grossing Bollywood films of all time. Personalized messages and handwritten posters helped in increasing the impressions on twitter. The campaign was successful in covering all channels and generated a heightened buzz before the release.
Image Credit: HNY Facebook Page