Influencers Are the New PR Tour

(Photo Credit: David Dobrik)

When I was younger, I'd sneak out of my bedroom late at night to watch Jay Leno. Every night, without fail, there was a guest on his show promoting their movie. As I got older, I stopped watching Jay Leno. It didn't appeal to me as much as it did when I was younger. I started to learn about movies from social media, particularly, YouTube.

I'd spend hours in college watching movie trailers. The YouTube algorithm would recommend trailer after trailer to me. I spent more hours watching trailers than movies in college. As I progressed through college, I stopped going to the movie theaters.

Why Go to the Movies?

It didn't seem worth it: spending $15 for a ticket, $7 for popcorn and $5 for a drink. $27 for me to watch one movie. Why would I do that when I had Netflix?

I wasn't the only one who stopped going to the movies. Brooks Barnes and Nicole Sperling writes:

" Looking at the last 20 years of attendance figures, the number of tickets sold in North America peaked in 2002, when cinemas sold about 1.6 billion. In 2019, attendance totaled roughly 1.2 billion, a 25 percent drop — even as the population of the United States increased roughly 15 percent."

This was before the pandemic even started. Now the movie theatres are really panicking. So I watched with fascination when Christopher Nolan announced he was planning a full-scale launch for his new film, Tenet. Tenet was following the traditional marketing playbook for movie releases. The first trailer for the movie was released to cinemas before the general public. The actors in the film and Mr. Nolan appeared on talk shows (via Zoom). The movie reportedly had a 9-figure budget for paid marketing. Tenet did do one thing out of the ordinary. They launched a new trailer on Fortnite.

Well, no shock, the traditional marketing playbook failed. The film needed to produce $800MM in revenue to break even. Since it's launch on August 12th, 2020, the film has only grossed $325MM, The studio has incurred a $475MM lost. It's clear that the old marketing playbook for film didn't work for Tenet.

Enter Borat 2.

On September 9th, rumors began to leak that Sacha Baron Cohen filmed a sequel to his movie Borat. On September 29th, Amazon announced they acquired the rights to the movie with a premiere date of October 23rd. Amazon and Sacha Baron Cohen, the actor who plays Borat, didn't follow the traditional marketing playbook. Instead, Borat aka Sacha Baron Cohen, followed the untraditional path.

Influencers are the new PR tour

Borat, engaged in a variety of public stunts to promote the film. He wished Katy Perry and Kim Kardashian happy birthday in very "Borat" style. He started a fake feud with Ariana Grande. He went on the Jimmy Kimmel Show and forced Jimmy Kimmel to take off his pants. But the most interesting thing he did is was partner with two influencers — DrLupo and David Dobrik.

DrLupo, a Twitch streamer, streamed with Borat. They didn't actual play any video games. Instead, Borat and DrLupo had a 15 minute conversation. Borat "couldn't" connect to the video game session. Borat, instead, explained Kazakh traditions to DrLupo.

The partnership with David Dobrik, a YouTube influencer, was even more interesting. David posted a video with Borat on his secondary channel. The stats (courtesy of Ian Borthwick) were mind-boggling:

• Trending #1

• 3 Million + views

• 29k comments

• 480k likes

And this was all in less than 24 hours of the video going up.

It's unclear how Borat 2 performed on Amazon, but one thing was clear, it was getting attention. So, what does this mean for the future of movies? Well, Ian Borthwick tweeted, "Influencers are the new PR tour".

And that sums it up perfectly. I wrote about this very concept in my piece, “Quibi Can Turn it Around by Doing This”:

"Spending money doesn't change the fundamental laws of supply and demand. There is a ton of content out there, but the next generation of consumers want content by people they understand. 40% of millennials believe their favorite creators understand them better than their friends.

Living at the intersection of this supply and demand curve is where Quibi can find success. They just need to adopt the new entertainment model.

The new entertainment model is focusing on influencers. YouTubers like MrBeast giving money to his fans. The new generation is obsessing with learning the latest TikTok dance from Addison Rae or paying for bath water (yes, this happened).

Quibi has $400MM in the bank. They can turn it around by adopting the entertainment model of the future. Give influencers money to produce original content for them. Give influencers more money if the content succeeds."

The consumer is adopting to traditional advertising. Paid media doesn't work as well as used to. You need to be authentic when you are trying to reach consumers. And that is why influencer partnerships are so popular. It gives your product instant credibility. A well-executed influencer partnership isn't an advertisement, but an endorsement of a product. The times change. Consumers change. If you don't change your marketing strategy with it, you might as well be burning money like Tenet.

Ian Borthwick’s tweet inspired this post and if you don’t follow him on Twitter, you should.