How Hollywood Studios Can Use Private Marketplaces To Boost Engagement

While all eyes will be on the 89th Academy Awards on Sunday, Feb. 26, Unruly has found that movie trailers don’t always connect with viewers or drive big box office success.

The company suggests that studios can attract more buzz around their movie trailers by bringing so-called “emotional intelligence” to their video campaigns. Unruly offers something it calls Emotional PMPs (private marketplaces) which it launched in September. Emotional PMPs are a series of curated private marketplaces that aim to help marketers match their ads with the mood of the environment or website they appear on.

Unruly conducted a case study recently with a movie studio it declined to specify. The goal was to programmatically reach viewers who were likely to emotionally engage with a heart-wrenching trailer for one of the studio's Thanksgiving movie releases. The campaign launched using Unruly’s nostalgic UnrulyX Emotional PMP in addition to a PMP curated to reach movie fans. These tactics were designed to amplify viewer response to the trailer.

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

When it comes to viewability, Unruly said its campaigns exceeded the Moat benchmark by 32%. This is due to the fact that UnrulyX formats are viewability-initiated and exceed Moat’s benchmarks for Media Rating Council viewability by 19%.

“The holidays are one of the busiest times of year for movie studios who are trying to break through the clutter. One of the biggest pitfalls that we see is the overlayering of data where marketers can target themselves out of relevant scale. Working with this particular studio was so refreshing, because they were willing to bring innovation and unconventional thinking to their campaign," stated Steven Sottile, SVP of North American sales, Unruly.

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